AlterNet.org: Emily Badgerhttp://www.alternet.org/authors/emily-badger
enIs Understanding Climate Change An Economic Luxury?http://www.alternet.org/story/154969/is_understanding_climate_change_an_economic_luxury
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">New research says that the state of the economy has a big impact on our opinions about climate change</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Environmentalists, scientists, and pollsters have devoted a lot of ink and energy over the last few years assessing a curious trend in perceptions about climate change. Several years ago, the American public appeared to start rejecting the idea of <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx" target="_blank">climate change</a>: poll after poll showed concern over the problem tailing off and suspicion of the science behind it <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/blogs/news-blog/public-opinion-s-climate-change-ping-pong-3854/" target="_blank">rising</a>.</p>
<div id="the_content"><p>What was going on here? Did opinion on climate reflect the partisan politics of the moment? Were people swayed by the weather outside, perhaps by that rash of <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/snowmaggedon-backs-all-climate-change-views-8784/" target="_blank">crazy snowstorms</a> in the winter of 2009-10? Were the dipping poll numbers simply the result of <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/questioning-questions-in-climate-flip-flops-10877/" target="_blank">poor question wording</a>? Or was it something more obvious?</p>
<p>“One of the things that was the most striking to me initially was that this just seemed to so obviously be correlated with the recession,” said <a href="http://polisci.uconn.edu/people/faculty/faculty.php?name=scruggs" target="_blank">Lyle Scruggs</a>, an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. “Opinion drops off right about the time the recession started.”</p>
<p>Scruggs was surprised more analysis of all this poll data didn’t point to the economy. So he looked into the correlation himself. Examining four decades of opinion polling data on environmental policy, he found that shifts in opinion on climate change have had more to do with the state of the economy than the weather outside, partisan politics, or the media’s influence. His analysis recently was published in the journal <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378012000143" target="_blank">Global Environmental Change</a>.</p>
<p>All of this suggests that the downturn was a temporary one. And, as if on cue, new polling data has just come out revealing concern about the climate is on the <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2012/02_climate_change_rabe_borick.aspx" target="_blank">rebound</a>. And, wouldn’t you know it, the economy is starting to rebound, too.</p>
<p>On its face, this connection between the economy and the environment isn’t particularly surprising. The two are depicted as adversaries. This certainly has been the narrative around the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-keystone-xl-pipeline/2011/12/19/gIQApUAX8P_story.html" target="_blank">Keystone XL pipeline</a>, which divides advocates into those who want jobs and those who want a clean environment, as if they are mutually exclusive.</p>
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<p>But something more perplexing is at play here. Opinion poll numbers didn’t just fall among people who said they were concerned about climate change. They dropped as well among people who said they believed in it. In a rough economy, it makes sense that people who fear the economic impacts of environmental regulation would prioritize jobs over the climate. But why would people in a recession change their fundamental beliefs about whether the problem exists at all?</p>
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<p>“If we really pushed them,” Scruggs said, “and said it’s completely illogical to say, ‘I need a job, therefore I stopped believing in something that’s scientifically true,’ they might admit to the contradiction.”</p>
<p>But where does this contradiction come from? Are these people being dishonest with polltakers — or with themselves?</p>
<p>Scruggs believes that people here are exhibiting what psychologists call <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hot-thought/201108/climate-change-denial" target="_blank">“motivated inference.”</a> If I believe that helping the climate will hurt the economy — and the people I know all really need jobs right now — it’s easier for me to simply deny that climate change exists than to admit that I’m willing to contribute to it for the sake of employment. Maybe, when it’s more convenient, I’ll go back to believing in climate change again.</p>
<p>“It is illogical in a certain sense,” Scruggs said. “But our opinions, it turns out, are often not as logically connected and coherent as we like to think they are.”</p>
<p>Scruggs and his co-author, graduate student Salil Benegal, found a similar pattern in polling data during the recession in Europe (where climate change is less politically charged than it is in the U.S). And this gives them even more confidence that the real culprit here is the economy. Scruggs suggests this finding should change how political scientists and the media interpret such swings in opinion data.</p>
<p>“The media is obsessed with saying, ‘Republicans are more likely to deny climate change than Democrats are, and this must be partisan polarization that’s driving this,’” Scruggs said. “The implication of this is ‘how terrible partisan politics is’ and this plays into that narrative. That may be the wrong way to go about it. Really, this is something that’s more cyclical.”</p>
<p>The other implication here is a more practical one: the height of the recession was probably the absolute worst time for Congress and the White House to attempt to pass climate legislation.</p>
<p>“On the other hand, you could say the policies that we want to put in place when the economy is good, we should start working on now,” Scruggs said. “Because they need to be ready to go when the [opinion] environment changes.”</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Miller-McCune's Washington correspondent Emily Badger follows the ideas informing, explaining and influencing government, from the local think tank circuit to academic research that shapes D.C. policy from afar. </div></div></div>Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune Magazine670320 at http://www.alternet.orgVisionsCultureEnvironmentVisionsWaterclimatedenialcognitive scienceAre Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals?http://www.alternet.org/story/153974/are_conservatives_more_fearful_than_liberals
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The GOP seems to understand a psychological phenomenon that researchers are studying: conservatives appear to be motivated by fear in a way that liberals are not.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/images/managed/storyimages_1328128566_screenshot20120201at3.35.33pm.png?itok=I-gW0lBO" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>The tone of this year’s Republican presidential primary (which now seems destined to last much <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/newt-gingrich-wins-south-carolina-primary/2012/01/21/gIQAKTxBHQ_story.html">longer</a>than Mitt Romney had been planning) seems sort of, well, fearful. One after the other, these would-be presidents have warned of looming threats — war with Iran, economic collapse, class warfare, social disintegration, illegal immigration — and have sought to position themselves as the best candidate for the job of protecting America.</p>
<p>Their political advisers must understand a psychological phenomenon that researchers have been studying for some time now: conservatives appear to be motivated by fear in a way that liberals are not. An expanding body of <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/a-new-take-on-political-ideology-24683/">research</a> suggests that Republicans and Democrats differ on some fundamental level in how they respond to positive and negative stimuli. A new study, published in the journal <em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-size: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; color: inherit; "><a href="http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/">Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B</a></em>, adds even more evidence to the theory that these two groups quite literally see the world differently.</p>
<p>Researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln showed people a series of photos — some endearing, some disgusting — and then measured their physiological and cognitive reactions. Conservatives, in keeping with <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/breaking-the-link-between-fear-and-conservatism-6705/">past literature</a>, reacted more strongly to the negative images, and liberals strongly to the positive ones.</p>
<p>The photos were plucked from the <a href="http://csea.phhp.ufl.edu/media/iapsmessage.html">International Affective Picture System</a>, a database containing hundreds of images that have been rated by a broad audience on dimensions such as how positive or negative, threatening or fearful they appear to people. The researchers presented some of the images to subjects and measured the response of liberals and conservatives using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_conductance">skin conductance</a>, which captures the same physiological reaction you might have when your palms go suddenly sweaty in a stressful situation.</p>
<p>They then presented subjects — now outfitted with eye-tracking equipment — with collages of four photos, one in each quadrant of a computer screen. The images were shown in positive and negative combinations, for example: a gruesome car accident, puppies, kittens and chocolate cake.</p>
<p>“I figured because conservatives reacted more strongly to negative things, they’d be more likely to avoid them,” said <a href="http://psych.unl.edu/faculty/faculty.asp?id=57">Mike Dodd</a>, an assistant professor of psychology and the study’s lead author. “That ended up not being the case. They ended up locking onto them quicker and taking more time on them, which makes sense from a policy perspective. Oftentimes they end up confronting things that they think of as threats.”</p>
<p>In this experiment, the results are all relative. Liberals spent a good amount of time gawking at the car wrecks, too. Our evolution as human beings has programmed all of us to pay heightened attention to threatening or frightening stimuli. But conservatives were drawn to the negative images almost twice as fast as the liberals were. And they fixated there longer, too. This suggests that there exists not only a physiological difference, but also a cognitive one in how political partisans react to such pictures.</p>
<p>“Political scientists traditionally thought of opinions as being mostly environmental: you adopt your political views based on what you learn and on your experiences,” Dodd said. “But it’s very unlikely your base levels of cognition are going to change because of those types of experiences.”</p>
<p>All of which means that your politics may in some way be influenced by your biology.</p>
<p>“If we had only had this study, and if you asked me how strongly I thought biology was implicated in politics, I would not be willing to give any strong conclusion,” Dodd said. But there is all of that other research, done by some of these <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5896/1667.abstract">academics</a> and <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201104/conservatives-big-fear-brain-study-finds">others</a>. “They are kind of pointing toward a common story of how there’s much more of a negative bias in conservatives and a positive one in liberals. That being said, our point of view this entire time has not been biological determinism; it’s not that biology is the<em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-size: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; color: inherit; ">only</em> important thing. But it seems to make sense it’s clearly a piece of the puzzle.”</p>
<p>This is not a controversial idea in plenty of other contexts. Most of us can fathom that our biology plays a role in what types of foods we’re drawn to, why we pick the mates we do, or how we react in stressful situations. So why is it so hard to imagine that biology may play a role in our politics, too?</p>
<p>This revelation could be the best thing to happen to political discourse since cable news started diminishing it (at least in America). You have probably witnessed — or been party to — a heated political debate between strong partisans.</p>
<p>“You will often hear them make arguments that they feel are quite logical, and they don’t understand why this person they’re talking to also can’t take this logical argument and incorporate it into their belief system,” Dodd said. “Part of the suggestion here is that that might actually not be possible. You have these two groups, and we’re showing them the same things, the same images and collages, but the way they react to them and <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/morals-authority-3775/">attend to them</a> is quite a bit different. [That] means they just might be fundamentally experiencing the world in different ways. That can to a degree foster understanding.”</p>
<p>That is, unless you tell your mortal political enemy, “I don’t think<em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-size: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; color: inherit; ">you’re</em> wrong — it’s just your biology that is.”</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C. area who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor. She previously covered college sports for the Orlando Sentinel and lived and reported in France. </div></div></div>Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:00:01 -0800Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com669395 at http://www.alternet.orgThe Right WingThe Right WingVisionsrepublicansright-wingersliberalsThe Wrong Kind of Fat Tax: Forget Taxing Soda to Curb Obesity, Tax Producers of Sugar and Sweetnershttp://www.alternet.org/story/153503/the_wrong_kind_of_fat_tax%3A_forget_taxing_soda_to_curb_obesity%2C_tax_producers_of_sugar_and_sweetners
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">This isn&#039;t the policy cure-all for obesity (or even the best way to curb it). But if politicians are determined to create some kind of fat tax, this would be the way to do it.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Public-health officials and policymakers across the United States have been talking a lot lately about tackling the epidemic of obesity through smaller nudges like a <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/cities-soda-taxes-obesity-and-more/">per-ounce tax on soda</a>. Not surprisingly, as enthusiasm for this idea expands, so too has soda-tax scholarship.</p>
<p>“Our take on this was basically that everybody is talking about a soda tax, so we stepped back and said, ‘Wait a minute, this is not very well targeted,’” said <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.econ.iastate.edu/people/faculty/beghin-john-c">John Beghin</a>, an economist at Iowa State University. “If you want to impose a tax and reduce calorie intake from sweeteners, there is a better way to do it.”</p>
<p>He and colleagues <a target="_blank" style="font-size: inherit !important; font-style: inherit; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.card.iastate.edu/facstaff/profile.aspx?id=23">Helen Jensen</a> and <a target="_blank" style="font-size: inherit !important; font-style: inherit; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.econ.iastate.edu/people/graduate-students/miao-zhen">Zhen Miao</a> propose a more inventive solution in a <a target="_blank" style="font-size: inherit !important; font-style: inherit; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.card.iastate.edu/publications/synopsis.aspx?id=1142">new paper</a> published in the journal <em style="color: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; "><a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=1074-3529">Contemporary Economic Policy</a></em>. Instead of sticking a fat tax on soda, they suggest a more effective policy would tax food producers on the corn syrup, sugar and other sweeteners they stick into products long before consumers get to them at the grocery store.</p>
<p>The authors are quick to stress that this isn’t the policy cure-all for obesity (or even the best way to curb it). But if politicians are determined to create some kind of fat tax, this would be the way to do it.</p>
<p>Such a tax would incentivize producers, rather than consumers, to change their behavior, and it would move the policy solution closer to the actual problem. Economists talk about this as the targeting principle — the idea that policy instruments should cut as close to the source of the trouble as possible.</p>
<p>In this case, if we want to target the unhealthy sweeteners in food and drinks, we’d do better to tax those ingredients directly rather than the entire can of soda. The researchers’ model suggests that, relative to a tax on unhealthy foods, a direct sweetener tax on producers would impact consumers less while also getting a much greater calorie-reduction bang for the buck.</p>
<p>As manufacturers are forced to pay more for ingredients like sugar or <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/sweetener-death-match-sugar-vs-syrup-36624/">high-fructose corn syrup</a>, that cost would still be passed on to the consumer. But it would look a lot smaller on your grocery bill than a soda tax. That’s because sweeteners <em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; color: inherit; ">taste</em> like the main ingredient in Coke or Little Debbie snack cakes, but they actually make up a fairly small percent of everything that goes into these foods (including labor, packaging and transportation). Even doubling the cost of corn syrup through a tax would only raise the price on the shelf of these products by a few cents.</p>
<p>To get the calorie reduction impact of a one-cent-per-ounce soda tax, the researchers project that we’d need a nearly 49 percent tax on the caloric sweeteners that go into it. But such a tax would only cost most of us at the grocery store about an extra $6 of lost purchase power per year.</p>
<p>“The idea is not to decrease food consumption, the idea is to decrease the sweetener consumption,” Beghin said. “That’s why the second scenario, using input taxes, is more effective. Consumers are not penalized; they don’t have to decrease their consumption so much. Instead of hitting them on the head with a hefty sales tax, like on a sweetened product like chocolate, you basically can affect the sugar intensity, the sweetener intensity at the producer level.”</p>
<p>The tax is still regressive, in that it has a heftier impact on low-income people who devote a larger share of their household expenditures to food (this is a common <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/03/11/soda-tax-is-new-york-soaking-the-poor/">objection to soda</a> taxes <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/dont-expect-soda-tax-to-curb-obesity-26341/">we’ve explained before</a>). But the effect is much smaller.</p>
<p>In their model, the researchers did not tax substitute sweeteners like honey that are <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.buzzaboutbees.net/honey-vs-sugar.html">perceived as healthier</a>. It’s possible such a tax would prod producers to shift, on a large scale, to these types of substitutes.</p>
<p>“You can certainly see evidence of that historically,” Jensen said. Manufacturers, shifted to <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; color: rgb(16, 83, 133) !important; text-decoration: none !important; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; " href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/high-fructose-corn-syrups-health-risks-remain-sticky-27633/">high-fructose corn syrup</a> in the early 1980s because tariff policy sent the price of sugar up. And in some cases, producers have even migrated to <em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-size: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.3em; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; color: inherit; ">more</em> sweeteners in products to compensate for reducing fat that now must be included on nutrition labels.</p>
<p>In the case of corn syrup, all of this might sound like sticking a tax on something we already subsidize. But Beghin says corn prices have gone up so much over the last decade — in part thanks to the rise of biofuels — that corn subsidies are no longer that significant. If we removed corn subsidies, that would have the effect of cutting back on only one-half of 1 percent of the sweeteners people consume (compared to the 10 percent reduction the researchers forecast with their tax).</p>
<p>There is, however, a much larger picture here: The real problem isn’t sweetener consumption, it’s obesity.</p>
<p>“Following the same idea of the targeting principle, if obesity is the problem, you should target obesity,” Beghin said. “And one way to do it would be provide incentives for better health behavior, or penalties for bad health behavior.”</p>
<p>Food taxes — even smart ones — don’t exactly do that.</p>
<p>“But very often,” Beghin said, “you have limitations on what you can do with health policy.” </p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:00:01 -0800Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com668858 at http://www.alternet.orgFoodPersonal HealthFoodfoodsodaobesitytaxsugar11 Vastly Different Americas? Why There's No Such Thing As a Unified Nationhttp://www.alternet.org/story/152803/11_vastly_different_americas_why_there%27s_no_such_thing_as_a_unified_nation
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Might it be that the traits and culture of the first nonnative colonizers in North America have left an indelible mark on the local society where they settled?</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Colin Woodard suggests that we’ve been vastly oversimplifying things by talking about America’s internal divisions between red states and blue states, between “the coasts” and the “heartland,” between the urban and the rural or even the North, South, Midwest and West. Instead, the veteran journalist slices North America (sans Mexico from Tampico south) into eleven culturally distinct regions that look something like a continentally gerrymandered map gone wild.</p>
<p>Until more Americans grasp what this map implies, he believes, we’ll continue to have a hard time forging national consensus.</p>
<p>Woodard floats this thesis in a new book,<a href="http://www.colinwoodard.com/americannations">American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America</a>, that offers novel perspective on the current U.S. predicament of culture wars mixed with political paralysis mixed with economic disarray. His assessment recalls another region with complicated geography: the Balkans.</p>
<p>Woodard studied Eastern European history in college, and he spent the early years of his journalism career reporting from that part of the world, where centuries-old cultural fissures and historic events have left a deep mark on the present — and where those fault lines don’t overlay very neatly with national borders on a map.<br />
“In returning to America and living in other parts of the country,” Woodard said this week, “it seemed clear to me these fissures exist on our continent as well. We just don’t recognize them.”</p>
<p>This idea has been broached before. Joel Garreau identified The Nine Nations of North America in his 1981 portrait of the country’s economic and cultural divisions. And historian David Hackett Fischer proposed later that decade, in Albion’s Seed, that four distinct British migrations had grafted parallel societies onto colonial soil.</p>
<p>But Woodard marries historical record with present-day observation into what he jokingly calls a “grand unified theory,” tracing the evolution of early settlement patterns through the regional differences that prompted the Civil War, the civil rights movement and current political polarization.</p>
<p>His theory rests on the idea that there has been tremendous continuity in regional cultures from the colonial era to the new millennium. He draws on literature arguing that the first self-sustaining settlement group to arrive in an empty territory (or, in the case of much of the U.S., a territory that’s been cleared of its existing inhabitants) has a dominating influence on the future evolution of that society and culture. The theory holds even when original settlers are far outnumbered by all of the people to come.</p>
<p>New York is a prime example. A global trading and financial center that prizes diversity and tolerance, to this day it shares many similarities with Amsterdam of 300 years ago. Dutch descendants, however, make up a fraction of 1 percent of the local population today.</p>
<p>These initial groups essentially laid down the cultural DNA that the rest of us who’ve come since have had to live to with,” Woodard said. “They created the institutions and cultural assumptions and norms over pieces of geography that formed the dominant culture that future groups encountered.”</p>
<p>(As a side note, this suggests that people who fear that the character of their communities will change dramatically with the influx of 21st century immigrants vastly overstate that threat.)</p>
<p>Among Woodard’s other “nations,” are “Yankeedom,” where Calvinist roots still feed public faith in the ability of government to do good; the originally Quaker and politically moderate “Midlands”; the deeply traditional and conservative “Tidewater,” settled by English gentry; and the individualistic “Greater Appalachia.” Woodard’s regions defy state boundaries. He groups Chicago with its northern neighbors and southern Illinois as part of Appalachia. California spans three nations: the “Left Coast,” the “Far West” and Spanish-influenced “El Norte.”</p>
<p>Of course, if these regions are defined today by the same fundamental cultural differences that divided them before the U.S. Revolution, that leads to the really unsettling proposition in Woodard’s book — that “shared American values” don’t really exist.</p>
<p>“Some people will find the notion that we don’t have a shared founding story and shared values and a shared model in society going back to the beginning … upsetting or even threatening,” Woodard said. “But it is in fact the case.”</p>
<p>Americans may look back to, say, the values of the founding fathers in 1776, or talk vaguely about “freedom” and “liberty.” “The problem is all of those traditional ideas and visions, those original intentions are true, but they’re only true for certain regional cultures,” Woodard said. “And they contradict each other. They can’t all be true of the same place as fundamental models.”</p>
<p>These divisions may also be widening. If his map is overlaid on top of Bill Bishop’s thesis in The Big Sort, Woodard says it looks as if Americans are not only sorting themselves into likeminded communities, but also likeminded nations, a trend that may only make consensus more elusive. Woodard doesn’t offer a prescription for reconciling all these nations, but he thinks we can’t have productive national policy discussions until we recognize that they exist (and surely election strategists will be the first ones to do this).</p>
<p>“Since many of these fundamental values and ideas of how society should be modeled are not compatible, there’s no way that you can just devise a compromise where everybody’s going to be happy,” Woodard said. “But maybe we can devise compromise where everybody’s grumbly but can live with it.”</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C. area who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor. She previously covered college sports for the Orlando Sentinel and lived and reported in France. </div></div></div>Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com668222 at http://www.alternet.orgWorldWorldamericanationCan We Tame the U.S. Government's Secrecy Machine?http://www.alternet.org/story/151145/can_we_tame_the_u.s._government%27s_secrecy_machine
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The information age is yielding reams of official communication not even worth saving, let alone classifying, yet the amount of material deemed secret has increased dramatically.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>The Nixon Presidential Library plans in June to officially release the<a target="_blank" href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2011/05/ppapers.html">Pentagon Papers</a>, the 7,000-page secret history of the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers">Vietnam War</a>that was famously first published, in part, by The New York Times in 1971. In the four decades since, the document has been the focus of innumerable newspapers articles, dozens of books — including both<a target="_blank" href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent1.html">complete versions</a> of the actual text itself — and even a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330760/">couple</a> of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1319726/">movies</a>.</p>
<p>But until now, the Pentagon Papers have never been formally declassified by the government originally responsible for writing them.</p>
<p>This odd fact underscores the convoluted and plodding nature of a U.S. secrecy system that classifies many documents not needing such protection and releases too slowly many others that have long since gone benign.</p>
<p>Barack Obama came into office <a target="_blank" href="http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/obama-declassification-order-lauded-by.html">pledging to reform this beast</a>, although the process he set in motion has been moving about as slowly as the broken system it seeks to repair. Only <a target="_blank" href="http://www.archives.gov/isoo/reports/2010-annual-report.pdf">19 out of 41 agencies</a> met Obama’s deadline this past December to review their classification policies and begin implementing reform. And as <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/aftergood.html">Steven Aftergood</a>, director of the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fas.org/">Federation of American Scientists</a>’ Project on Government Secrecy, has observed, the president was never <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.archives.gov/transformingclassification/?p=226">all that specific</a> in exactly what he was looking for in a “fundamental transformation” of the system.</p>
<p>The problem — as exemplified in the official release of a document that’s been <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent1.html">easily accessible</a> for decades — clearly requires big ideas more than bureaucratic adjustments. And as part of the government’s efforts, a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.archives.gov/pidb/">Public Interest Declassification Board</a> has been considering some of the major architectural changes that would be required to fix and move the system into the 21st century. The board oversees the government process and reports directly to the president (it also reported to the public at a <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.archives.gov/transformingclassification/?p=186">forum today in Washington</a>), although it has little power to compel individual agencies to adopt its ideas.</p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/jes67/?PageTemplateID=39">Jennifer Sims</a>, director of intelligence studies at the Georgetown University Center for Peace and Security Studies, was appointed by Obama to the board. One if its main challenges, she said, is the sheer volume of the backlog — and the requirement that every agency with any interest in an individual document has the <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.archives.gov/transformingclassification/?p=110">right to review it</a>. A document that contains classified information about weapons of mass destruction originally obtained by a CIA agent, for example, must be reviewed by the Department of Energy and the intelligence community.</p>
<p>“This multiagency review of a single document exponentially increases the amount of work involved and the number of eyes that have to review the document,” Sims said. “But that’s all just dealing with the paper documents. The real challenge is going to be handling the volume of digital material that’s being generated every day now.”</p>
<p>Think of how many emails flow in and out of your inbox every day — and multiply that by every government employee in every federal agency from the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.dia.mil/">Defense Intelligence Agency</a> to the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nsa.gov/">National Security Agency</a>.</p>
<p>The information age is yielding reams of official communication not even worth saving, let alone classifying. But for all the ways technology is complicating secrecy, it also holds promise for redesigning the entire system. Part of the board’s mandate is to visualize how that might work not just today but 20 years from now.</p>
<p>“That’s a big task,” Sims said. “That’s a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.darpa.mil/">DARPA</a>-type task, a truly transformative task, which makes the work very, very difficult.”</p>
<p>So what would a federal classification system look like on the other end of a “fundamental transformation”? Sims offered her vision, one of several on the board.</p>
<p>“It would almost be an artificial-intelligence-like capability,” she said, “so that we would have no longer this 25-year rule. Documents would be constantly searched by a central automated processing capability that does contextual analysis of every document ingested into the system.”</p>
<p>Such software would crawl through the government’s digital record in real time, determining which documents warrant classification, which don’t and which need to be reviewed by a human eye. It could automatically redact sensitive material and tag classified documents with a targeted release date. Older paper records could be digitized and fed into the system. A user interaction component could allow policymakers to dip into the trove to examine documents or release them, as current events require.</p>
<p>“It is a whole system that solves the front-end problem, which is sometimes overclassification of documents or underclassification of documents or inconsistent classification of documents,” Sims said, “and at the back end, also allows us to process much more rapidly in real time the declassification.”</p>
<p>The <a target="_blank" href="http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/3871451/Jeff-Jonas-on-Business-Intelligence-Software.htm">technology</a> isn’t so far-fetched. But whether such a lumbering government system could realistically transform itself in this mold — that’s the other question.</p>
<p>“We want to think bold,” Sims said, “but at the same time not get so bold that we don’t grapple simultaneously with our current issues.”</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Tue, 31 May 2011 07:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com666599 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsNews & PoliticsHuman Rightsobamahomeland securitysecrecyWill the FCC Ever Do Its Job and Take on the Telecoms?http://www.alternet.org/story/151105/will_the_fcc_ever_do_its_job_and_take_on_the_telecoms
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The agency is frequently derided as beholden more to industry than taxpayers.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>FCC Commissioner <a href="http://transition.fcc.gov/commissioners/baker/" target="_blank">Meredith Attwell Baker</a> announced earlier this month that she’s <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/fcc-commissioner-meredith-baker-to-join-comcast-nbc/2011/05/11/AFYfl1rG_blog.html" target="_blank">leaving the agency</a> for a job as the senior vice president of government affairs for Comcast-NBC Universal. The decision wasn’t particularly surprising or even unusual. Public servants exit government all the time for K Street suites where their expertise is more profitable.</p>
<p>Baker’s timing, however, caused an uproar: In January, she voted to approve the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/18/technology/fcc_comcast_nbc/index.htm" target="_blank">merger of Comcast and NBC</a>, creating the very company for which she’ll be lobbying later this summer.</p>
<p>Politicians and pundits <a href="http://waters.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=240931" target="_blank">denounced</a> what looked like a particularly offensive case of a regulator bolting for the regulated. <em>The New York Times</em>‘ editorial page clucked its <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/opinion/13fri3.html?_r=1" target="_blank">disapproval</a>. Public interest groups began <a href="http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/fcc_baker/" target="_blank">calling for an investigation</a>, and Baker had to <a href="http://www.fcc.gov/document/statement-commissioner-meredith-attwell-baker" target="_blank">issue a statement</a> defending herself against ethics charges.<br /><span class="dont_print_this"><div class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 110px;"> </div>
</span> “I have no doubt she dotted all her I’s and crossed all her T’s,” said <a href="http://www.publicknowledge.org/about/who/staff/sohn" target="_blank">Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn</a>. “She didn’t do anything illegal, and I don’t see any reason why there should be an investigation. But, be that as it may, it still looks terrible” — especially when spliced up by the <a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-may-16-2011/well--that-was-fast---comcast-nbc-merger" target="_blank">Jon Stewart machine</a>.</p>
<p>Baker’s greatest crime, as Sohn sees it, is that she took advantage of a bad system. And so her story speaks — more so than to anything about Baker personally — to a long-running priority of groups like Sohn’s: the need for extensive reform of the FCC.</p>
<p>The agency, helmed by a five-member commission, is frequently derided as broken by public interest groups that worry that it’s beholden more to industry than taxpayers. The regulator is structured in such a way that immense power is vested in the chairman of the commission (currently <a href="http://transition.fcc.gov/commissioners/genachowski/biography.html" target="_blank">Julius Genachowski</a>). The agency has long conducted much of its business off the record and <a href="http://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2010/02/articles/general-fcc/fcc-looks-to-revise-ex-parte-rules-how-much-public-disclosure-is-necesary-when-lobbying-the-fcc/" target="_blank">away from public view</a>, fueling decisions informed as much by politics as data.</p>
<p>And, as Baker’s case underscores, the agency suffers from an intimate relationship with the industry it regulates, one that Sohn believes could only be severed by a legislative ban on traffic between the two during a multiyear cooling-off period. (The Obama administration’s own <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15515.html" target="_blank">ethics rules</a> will prevent Baker from lobbying the FCC directly for the next two years — but she can start chatting up Congress as soon as she pleases.)</p>
<p>Public Knowledge last year published an outline of <a href="http://fcc-reform.org/f/fccref/fcc-reform-report-card-details-03052010_0.pdf" target="_blank">proposed reform</a> of the FCC for the Internet age. “In almost all cases,” Sohn and <a href="http://www.publicknowledge.org/user/2258" target="_blank">Michael Weinberg</a> wrote, “the types of reforms we suggest will involve a surrender of discretion by FCC leadership and a move away from unpredictable and ad hoc decision-making.” As such, the reforms will likely be hard to extract.</p>
<p>The agency’s revolving-door problems in particular have grown more troublesome as the FCC has evolved from its roots in the 1930s as a regulator of federal radio spectrum.</p>
<p>“Things have definitely gotten worse because of the money,” Sohn said. “Thirty years ago you could go work for a broadcaster or a telephone company. Now we’re talking about multinational media conglomerates, telecommunications conglomerates who just have money to burn. It’s worse now just because the stakes are so much higher.”</p>
<p>The chairman’s goal shouldn’t be — as Sohn says Genachowski has sought to do — to strike compromise between consumer interests and industry.</p>
<p>“I don’t think you ignore [industry], but it’s not about cutting deals,” Sohn said. “In any decision, some oxes are going to be gored, that’s just the way it is. Any FCC chairman’s goal should be more competition, lower prices, more innovation. And, more often than not, that’s going to gore the ox of the incumbent.”</p>
<p>That is, of the Comcasts and the AT&amp;Ts.</p>
<p>“If you do that, if you regulate to promote competition and consumer choice, that means you’re favoring the little guy over the big guy, which ultimately favors the consumer,” she said. “This notion that somehow regulators shouldn’t favor anybody — no, you have to make choices, and somebody’s going to be happy and somebody’s going to be unhappy. The FCC is duty-bound by law to make the public happy, to make consumers happy.”</p>
<p>Sohn isn’t optimistic about many of these changes in the culture and procedure of how the FCC runs. Legislative limits on the revolving door, for instance, would depend on the votes of congressmen who dip into the same lobbying largesse.</p>
<p>Sohn is also conscious of the fact she doesn’t want to cry too loudly about the flawed system that paved Meredith Baker’s path to NBCU.</p>
<p>“You have to be careful, because if you just say, ‘Washington is hopeless and government is completely corrupt,’ then out of other side of your mouth say, ‘We want government to give us A, B and C,’ you’ve thrown everybody into the cynical camp,” she said. “So why should government do anything?”</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Thu, 26 May 2011 09:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com666460 at http://www.alternet.orgMediaMediafcctelecomsattPiles of Manure, Delayed Veterans' Benefits: 10 Possible Consequences of a GOP-Forced Government Shutdownhttp://www.alternet.org/story/150522/piles_of_manure%2C_delayed_veterans%27_benefits%3A_10_possible_consequences_of_a_gop-forced_government_shutdown
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Government&#039;s last big shutdown offers a glimpse of what could happen come this weekend.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>The federal government has been coy, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/federal-unions-obama-administration-isnt-forthcoming-with-shutdown-plans/2011/03/23/AFLIRHdC_blog.html" target="_blank">even with its own employees</a>, about exactly what a government shutdown would look like — who’d have to work and who wouldn’t, which services would be considered essential and which ones eligible for suspension. Administration officials may be hoping that if they don’t talk too much about the alternative, a budget agreement will materialize in Congress by Friday night.</p>
<p>But <a href="http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/debt/governmentshutdown.html" target="_blank">government’s last big shutdown</a> spanning New Year’s in 1995-96 — at 21 days, the longest hiatus in D.C. history — offers a glimpse of what could happen come this weekend. This list of 10 potentially affected programs brings home one of the most startling realities about a shutdown: The federal government is responsible for a lot more than war and taxes, and Americans who seldom recognize <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/probing-the-depths-of-the-submerged-state-28031/" target="_blank">Uncle Sam’s help when they get it</a> may come to miss him dearly once he’s gone.</p>
<p>1. During the last shutdown, the cleanup of toxic waste was halted at 609 <a href="http://www.epa.gov/superfund/" target="_blank">Superfund sites</a>, with 2,400 workers sent home, according to a report compiled by the <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34680.pdf" target="_blank">Congressional Research Service</a>. Government protocol during a shutdown calls for continuing work that is essential to “protect life and property,” but this may not include threats from toxic waste.</p>
<p>2. That CRS report documented another impact for human health — during the last shutdown, the <a href="http://www.nih.gov/" target="_blank">National Institutes of Health</a> had to stop answering hotlines devoted to diseases. Agencies of the federal government such as the <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/" target="_blank">CDC</a> operate a number of such hotlines, offering resources on everything from <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/guidelines/herrg/pub-info_hotlines.htm" target="_blank">AIDS</a> to <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/about/contact/default.htm" target="_blank">immunization</a>.</p>
<p>3. Delinquent child-support cases were delayed during the last shutdown. These were among the numerous law-enforcement investigations held up by a standstill in work not tied directly to border security or the safety of federal installations like prisons and waterways. Work on 3,500 bankruptcy cases was also suspended in the mid-’90s, according to the CRS report.</p>
<p>4. Parks and federal tourist destinations closed during the last shutdown, and they undoubtedly would this time around as well. This would include national parks, battlefields (amid the sesquicentennial of the Civil War!), Smithsonian museums and trips up the Washington Monument and Statue of Liberty. The resulting loss in tourism would affect nongovernment entities as well, from restaurants to hotels to airlines.</p>
<p>5. The federal government now processes payments to recipients of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare electronically. But with staff at many of these agencies forced to stay home during a shutdown, new users of these programs could have a hard time enrolling in them. During the 1995 shutdown, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030302621.html" target="_blank">Medicare was estimated to have 10,000 new applications a day</a>, and a shutdown this spring would be bad timing for the first of the baby boomers about to turn 65.</p>
<p>6. Benefits decisions for veterans could similarly be delayed. During the November 1995 shutdown, <em>The Washington Post</em> (which has <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2011/03/national_zoo_has_new_manure_pl.html" target="_blank">collected online</a> some earlier shutdown articles from its archives) reported on an injured veteran who had waited years for an appointment with the Board of Veterans Appeals, only to have it <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030302621.html" target="_blank">canceled</a> in the shutdown.</p>
<p>7. Federal workers who process passport and visa applications will probably also be staying home. This would affect foreign tourists, Americans hoping to travel abroad, foreign workers living here who need to renew their visas, and universities and foreign exchange programs sending students back and forth.</p>
<p>8. During the last shutdown, <em>The Washington Post</em> noted one particularly ugly impact — <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030303711.html" target="_blank">manure piled up</a> in a parking lot of the National Zoo when it couldn’t be transported elsewhere for composting (zookeepers, however, did continue <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030302201_4.html" target="_blank">feeding the animals</a>). The zoo says it has updated its <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2011/03/national_zoo_has_new_manure_pl.html" target="_blank">waste-disposal plans</a> in the event of another shutdown.</p>
<p>9. Research facilities like presidential libraries and the <a href="http://www.loc.gov/index.html" target="_blank">Library of Congress</a> will likely shut their doors. <em>The Post</em> reported in 1995 that the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030302201.html" target="_blank">Library of Congress’ computer system went offline</a> the moment the government shut down. At the time, it processed 1 million transactions a day.</p>
<p>10. Activities essential to public health and safety are supposed to continue, and this includes, according to the CRS, “safe use of food and drugs.” But clinical trials and decisions on regulating<a href="http://www.fdalawblog.net/fda_law_blog_hyman_phelps/2011/03/snowmageddon-a-government-shutdown-and-other-acts-of-nature-mother-or-human-what-are-the-effects-on-.html" target="_blank">new drugs and devices could be delayed</a>, and government scientists will likely be among those furloughed. Less clear is the fate of government inspectors.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Wed, 06 Apr 2011 06:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com665893 at http://www.alternet.orgEconomyEconomyrepublicansgopgovernment shutdownVision: Research Shows People Are Often Selfless -- Government Should Cultivate the Giving Instincthttp://www.alternet.org/story/149462/vision%3A_research_shows_people_are_often_selfless_--_government_should_cultivate_the_giving_instinct
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Much of our policy resides on the faulty assumption that people are more likely to act in selfish ways. That&#039;s just not true.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Most of our thinking about how to influence human behavior -- how to get people to pay taxes, to obey laws, to not steal from each other -- rests on the model of <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus" target="_blank">homo economicus</a></em>.</p>
<p>This creature, first sketched by economists more than a century ago, is generally out for his own rational self-interest. He (or she) is, in short, selfish, and when we want him to do something, policymakers usually keep that in mind.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/index.asp?page=722" target="_blank">Lynn Stout</a>, a professor of corporate law at UCLA, began to wonder about this deeply entrenched assumption, which leaves little room in human behavior for what we might call a “conscience.”</p>
<p>“The more I read, the more fascinated I became,” Stout said. “If you actually look at the data -- the hard science on how people really behave -- it becomes clear that the selfishness assumption is violated all the time. It is remarkably unusual for people to behave in a purely selfish fashion.”</p>
<p>More often than we think, people of all cultures -- even <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/12/31/0956797610395392.abstract" target="_blank">children as young as 3</a>, according to new research — behave “pro-socially.” That is, they sacrifice their own self-interest, at least to some extent, to serve the larger group or an ethical ideal. Given the right social cues and situations, almost all of us will behave this way.<br /><span class="dont_print_this"><div class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 110px;"> </div>
</span> “This is an empirical fact of human behavior,” Stout said. “And it’s fascinating to me, because you saw almost no reference to it in economic or policy circles.”</p>
<p>She now believes pro-social behavior could be harnessed to shape all kinds of policies, a radical proposal she outlines in the new book <em><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9272.html" target="_blank">Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People</a></em> and in this <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/%7E/media/Files/rc/papers/2010/12_conscience_stout/12_conscience_stout.pdf" target="_blank">abridged Brookings paper</a>).</p>
<p>We associate conscience, Stout concedes, with religious leaders and populist politicos. But she wants to get government regulators, lawyers and businessmen thinking seriously about it, too. Most of our laws today are designed to influence behavior through carrots and sticks that appeal to selfishness. We motivate CEOs through material incentive in pay-for-performance schemes. We warn would-be tax cheats with the threat of an IRS audit.</p>
<p>If we want to appeal to conscience instead of greed -- a potentially much cheaper strategy -- we first have to recognize how common and powerful pro-social behavior already is.</p>
<p>“Once you become sensitive to this, it’s all around you,” Stout said. Evolution, however, has primed us not to notice it. Picture, Stout suggests, a homeless man passed out on the sidewalk by his daily dollar collection. If you watched 10 people walk by him without dropping a cent, would you consider those people selfish? Or would you recognize the decision each made not to steal the man’s money?</p>
<p>Likely, you picked the first option, because our survival rests on keeping an eye out for the cheaters and not the do-gooders. But we notice bad behavior precisely because we <em>expect</em> people to be good, a sign that pro-social behavior exists everywhere (and is taken for granted).</p>
<p>Laws, Stout says, could further encourage good behavior, and she focuses on three social cues that have been shown to trigger it. First, people need instructions from authority. If we don’t want people to do something, we have to communicate that to them. Insider trading, for example, takes place despite laws prohibiting it because the government doesn’t signal that it takes the crime all that seriously.</p>
<p>People also behave pro-socially when they think others do as well (just as we behave selfishly when we see selfishness around us). And we’re more likely to act pro-socially when we understand how it helps others (or when it’s explained to us how bad behavior harms others).</p>
<p>A campaign to encourage higher tax compliance, for example, might emphasize how many Americans <em>do</em> pay their taxes and why tax proceeds benefit us all. And crafting it would undoubtedly be cheaper than hiring more IRS agents.</p>
<p>“You’re leaving a bunch of tools in your toolkit unused,” Stout said, when we reach only for carrots and sticks. “Why should we focus only on material incentives -- which by the way can be very expensive -- when we have all these ways to encourage people to do a good job, tell the truth, obey the law, work hard and which cost us much less. Economists should be horrified that we’re behaving so inefficiently.”</p>
<p>Stout says she’s not trying to turn everyone into a Mother Theresa. Selfish behavior has its place; you should feel free to play the stock market to the fullest extent for your own personal gain. Government’s role, she says, is to recognize when we should be selfish and when we should not and, in the latter case, to crank up the social cues that encourage pro-social behavior.</p>
<p>If this sounds like sinister behavior modification -- a concern to some any time social science informs public policy -- Stout responds that we don’t really have a choice.</p>
<p>“No matter what government does, it’s sending signals that change behavior,” she said, “it’s making people more selfish or less selfish. Wouldn’t it be smart to recognize that reality, and to encourage [people] to be selfish when that’s efficient, and to encourage them to be pro-social when that’s efficient?”</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C. area who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor. </div></div></div>Sun, 09 Jan 2011 09:00:01 -0800Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com664841 at http://www.alternet.orgActivismActivismsocialselfishnessselflessinstinctDo School Lunches Plump Up Poor Kids?http://www.alternet.org/story/148070/do_school_lunches_plump_up_poor_kids
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Does the National School Lunch Program make children obese, or are obese children simply more likely to sign up for the program in the first place?</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p><span class="dropcap">S</span>tudents who participate in the <a linkindex="48" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/lunch/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','www.fns.usda.gov']);" target="_blank">National School Lunch Program</a> are more likely to come from lower-income families or families with two working parents who don’t have time to pack a brown-bag lunch the night before. Those same students, as a quick glance around many school cafeterias this fall will show, are also more likely to be overweight.</p>
<p>The challenge for researchers and policymakers has been to sort out the relationship between the two.</p>
<p>“When you just look at those groups [who participate in school lunch], those are groups also more likely to not be the healthiest kids,” said <a linkindex="49" href="http://faculty.smu.edu/millimet/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','faculty.smu.edu']);" target="_blank">Daniel Millimet</a>, an economist at Southern Methodist University. “Then there’s a question of whether or not there’s actually something causal going on, or does the perception just reflect people who are self-selecting into the program?”</p>
<p>In other words: Does the National School Lunch Program make children obese, or are obese children simply more likely to sign up for the program in the first place?</p>
<p>This riddle is deeply relevant for policymakers trying to mine a solution to the country’s obesity epidemic – an epidemic that may even have <a linkindex="50" href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/tomorrows-gi-joe-may-be-too-fat-to-fight-18214/" target="_blank">national security implications</a> — in the school cafeteria.</p>
<p>Millimet, alongside Georgia State economist <a linkindex="51" href="http://www2.gsu.edu/%7Eecort/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','www2.gsu.edu']);" target="_blank">Rusty Tchernis</a> and Muna Husain of Kuwait University, now believe school lunches are partly to blame.</p>
<p>“When we try to isolate causal effect,” Millimet said, “it’s surprising that there’s still something there.”</p>
<p>In their paper <a href="http://www2.gsu.edu/%7Eecort/MTH2010.pdf" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','www2.gsu.edu']);" target="_blank">“School Nutrition Programs and the Incidence of Childhood Obesity,”</a> published in the <a linkindex="52" href="http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/jhr/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','www.ssc.wisc.edu']);" target="_blank"><em>Journal of Human Resources</em></a>, the authors rely on data on 13,500 students taken from the <a linkindex="53" href="http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/series/00191" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','www.icpsr.umich.edu']);" target="_blank">Early Childhood Longitudinal Study</a>, which tracked children who entered kindergarten in the fall of 1998 through the eighth grade. The survey includes annual data on height and weight, which the researchers used to calculate body mass indexes (they define obesity as above the 95th percentile in BMI).</p>
<p>The original survey also asked parents for data on the birth weight of their children, allowing the researchers to assess weight gains from birth through kindergarten, isolating the health status of children before they entered the school lunch program. The researchers also accounted for the likely meals children received from their parents at home.<br /><span class="dont_print_this"><div class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 110px;"><p class="wp-caption-text"> </p>
</div>
</span>Controlling for those two factors, they found that children who participate in the school lunch program are more likely to become obese than those who don’t. In a surprising twist, though, the federally subsidized <a linkindex="55" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/breakfast/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','www.fns.usda.gov']);" target="_blank">School Breakfast Program</a> has the opposite effect. (And children who eat both school breakfast and lunch are less heavy than those who participate in neither program.)</p>
<p>Millimet has a few theories to explain this. Breakfast is, as nutritionists say, the most important meal of the day. “In general, even if breakfast weren’t in compliance with federal nutrition guidelines, even if they were close,” Millimet said, “I think a lot of nutritionists would argue that’s still a good thing.”</p>
<p>He also points to one difference between school breakfast and lunch – the latter has more a la carte options, which are not subject to the USDA nutrition <a linkindex="56" href="http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2005/document/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','www.health.gov']);" target="_blank">guidelines</a> because they are not reimbursable by the federal government.</p>
<p>The a la carte tray comes with a unique set of economics. Schools are reimbursed a set amount for each meal on the cafeteria line they sell.</p>
<p>“But then if on your way out, you pick up an extra ice cream sandwich, paying that out of pocket, the government doesn’t know about it, schools don’t get reimbursed,” Millimet said, “and whatever profit the schools earn on that is revenue they can spend on whatever they want.” Like teacher salaries or classroom supplies.</p>
<p>Schools may be conflicted in wanting — and needing — to offer the items kids will buy. And most kids, untethered from the benevolent influence of the grownup who dishes out the lunch tray, will go for the a la carte ice cream sandwich over the plate of <a linkindex="57" href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/lunches-even-the-lunch-lady-wouldnt-eat-16184/" target="_blank">broccoli</a>.</p>
<p>The answer may not be so simple as removing the a la carte tray.</p>
<p>“We need to think about how to make school lunches more healthy as well as profitable to schools,” Millimet said. “Health is important, but it’s only one issue that schools are dealing with. Before we go overboard one way or another, we have to think through the full ramifications.”</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com663470 at http://www.alternet.orgFoodPersonal HealthFoodfoodnutritionobesityschool lunchchildhood obesityVirginia AG and Tea Party Favorite Sues Scientist for Studying Climate Changehttp://www.alternet.org/story/147047/virginia_ag_and_tea_party_favorite_sues_scientist_for_studying_climate_change
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Ken Cuccinelli&#039;s lawsuit against climate scientist Michael Mann will have a chilling effect and could deter scientists from work in politically controversial fields.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Virginia’s recently elected attorney general, <a href="http://www.oag.state.va.us/">Ken Cuccinelli</a>, has his hand in just about every divisive issue of the day. He is leading his own charge against the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032304224.html">constitutionality</a> of the health care bill, he is <a href="http://www.oag.state.va.us/LEGAL_LEGIS/CourtFilings/Comm%20v%20EPA%20-%20Pet%20for%20Reconsideration%202_16_10.pdf">suing</a> the Environmental Protection Agency to block it from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and he is <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/05/AR2010030501582.html">tussling</a> with state universities over whether they can bar discrimination based on sexual orientation.</p>
<p>But the local fight with potentially the broadest reach is the one Cuccinelli has picked against a single scholar — Penn State climatologist <a href="http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/">Michael Mann</a>.</p>
<p>Mann is the author of what’s known in climate research circles as the <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/manns-hockey-stick.gif">“hockey stick graph”</a> that charted rapidly rising temperatures in the 20th century. He came to wider attention last November as one of the researchers at the heart of the <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/quailing-before-the-messy-business-of-science-5882/">“climategate”</a> e-mail controversy.</p>
<p>Critics accused Mann and other scientists of manipulating data to portray a climate threat that doesn’t really exist. Their research, though, has since been cleared by <a href="http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/Findings_Mann_Inquiry.pdf)%20the%20British%20House%20of%20Commons,%20(http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/phil%20jones%20house%20of%20commons%20report.pdf">Penn State</a>, as well as the <a href="http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP">University of East Anglia</a>, from which the disputed e-mails were originally stolen.</p>
<p>Cuccinelli, still a skeptic, is now investigating Mann’s 1999-2005 stint at the University of Virginia using an unlikely tool — the <a href="http://www.taf.org/virginiafca.htm">Fraud Against Taxpayers Act</a>. He wants to know if Mann defrauded taxpayers in search of grant money for his research, and last month he <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050304139.html">served</a> the university with an extensive <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/Virginia_Attorney_General_CID.pdf">“Civil Investigative Demand”</a> for documents.</p>
<p>The case touches off a number of unsettling issues around academic freedom, scientific integrity and the role of politics in research. And it has implications, academics worry, not just for scientists.</p>
<p>“The largest one is the precedent that it sets,” said <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/news/experts/francesca-grifo.html">Francesca Grifo</a>, who directs the scientific integrity program with the <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/">Union of Concerned Scientists</a>. “If he gets away with this, then there are ever so many fields, ever so many kinds of both ideologically and economically motivated harassment of this type that could rain down on scientists in any state.”</p>
<p>UCS helped rally more than 800 academics and scientists in the state of Virginia to <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/Virginia-Scientist-Letter.pdf">sign a letter</a> last week urging Cuccinelli to drop the investigation. The board of the <a href="http://www.aaas.org/">American Association for the Advancement of Science</a> has similarly <a href="http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2010/media/0518board_statement_cuccinelli.pdf">weighed in</a>, calling the attorney general’s move an “apparently political action.” Other letters appealing to Cuccinelli or supporting the university in its <a href="http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=11836">response</a> have come from the <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Law-School-Letter-to-BOV-RE-CID-May-18.pdf">UVA law school</a>, the <a href="http://www.acslaw.org/node/16072">American Association of University Professors</a> and the <a href="http://www.acluva.org/publications/20100506ACLUAAUPUVALtr.pdf">American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia</a>.</p>
<p>Whether Cuccinelli abandons the case or not, many of these organizations fear it already has had a chilling effect and could deter scientists from work in politically controversial fields — or, more specifically, could deter work on climate change down the road in Virginia.</p>
<p>“If this thing goes through, if he keeps going, there’s no way I’m going to want to be a climate scientist in the state of Virginia,” said <a href="http://trane.evsc.virginia.edu/Welcome.html">Amato Evan</a>, an assistant professor in the environmental sciences department at UVA where Mann worked. “It just sounds like you’re setting yourself up for some kind of trouble somewhere down the line.”</p>
<p>He worries, too, about the meager <a href="http://www.oag.state.va.us/PRESS_RELEASES/Cuccinelli/51910_VA_Tech.html">explanation</a> Cuccinelli has given for the inquiry. The attorney general has said he is investigating misuse of taxpayer dollars, not Mann’s scientific conclusions, although the two appear inextricably linked.</p>
<p>“I can’t figure out the motive other than to really position himself as a sweetheart of the Tea Party,” Evan said. “As a scientist, I feel like who’s next? Two, three years from now, when he wants to run as governor, if I’m doing really good work, if I’m very well known for the work that I keep doing on climate change, is he going to come and start harassing me, too, as a way of making himself more politically viable? For me, that’s a huge concern.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/neurosci/Faculty/Holt/JeffHolt.cfm">Jeff Holt</a>, an associate professor of neuroscience at UVA who also signed the UCS letter, sees Cuccinelli’s investigation distorting the fundamental scientific process. Early hypotheses are often proven wrong or are later adjusted with new data through peer review — that’s how science works. Research fraud does exist, but it’s rooted out and discredited by other scientists.</p>
<p>“The idea that you have a criminal investigation into what would be normally a conventional academic process, a scientific process, seems very misplaced,” Holt said.</p>
<p>Cuccinelli’s foray where other scientific panels before him have already gone also raises the question of whether it’s ever appropriate for politicians to assess the validity of technical research.</p>
<p>Mann’s original grant proposals were likely vetted by more scientific expertise than exists in Cuccinelli’s office, Evan said.</p>
<p>“It’s not their job,” Grifo added of politicians in general. “They have many important roles to play in the scientific enterprise.”</p>
<p>Elected officials appropriate funds for science, for example, and confirm agency heads.</p>
<p>“But this is not one of them,” Grifo said.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Sun, 30 May 2010 12:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com662406 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsNews & PoliticsEnvironmentsouthscienceclimate changeconservativeacademic freedomvirginiatea partyken cuccinellimichael mannSchool Lunches Even the Lunch Lady Wouldn't Eathttp://www.alternet.org/story/147024/school_lunches_even_the_lunch_lady_wouldn%27t_eat
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Congress is preparing to take up reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, but the recipe for success is far from simple.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>An anonymous Midwestern elementary school teacher has been filing daily <a linkindex="50" href="http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com');" target="_blank">dispatches</a> from the cafeteria, posting to her blog each day cell phone-snapped photos of <a linkindex="51" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DXoX9uylSQ0/S_SUfhMPvUI/AAAAAAAAAjM/3MovAonKqnM/s1600/popcornchic4-798126.jpg" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/4.bp.blogspot.com');">popcorn chicken</a> and <a linkindex="52" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DXoX9uylSQ0/S-9gPcDM1FI/AAAAAAAAAiE/Nzv8bih4g0I/s1600/meatloaf1-740268.jpg" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/3.bp.blogspot.com');" target="_blank">prepackaged meatloaf</a>. She has been documenting, every day, what the kids in her school are fed for lunch.</p>
<p>As Mrs. Q’s several thousand followers have found, however, the grub fed American schoolchildren looks pretty disgusting when you put it up on the Internet. (In fact, the images and accompanying commentary are so unappetizing, Mrs. Q has to explain on her site that she stays anonymous to protect her <a linkindex="53" href="http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/2010/03/faq.html" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com');" target="_blank">job</a>.)</p>
<p>The blog — and similar <a linkindex="54" href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/fedupwithschoollunch/" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.flickr.com');" target="_blank">photos</a> other teachers have been prompted to send in — puts a greasy, cellophane-wrapped face on the alarming research about school lunch, a subject of growing interest in Washington as Congress prepares to take up reauthorization of the <a linkindex="55" href="http://www.healthyschoolscampaign.org/getinvolved/action/childnutrition/act.php" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.healthyschoolscampaign.org');" target="_blank">Child Nutrition Act</a>.</p>
<p>The topic is suddenly in vogue, from Mrs. Q’s viral website, to Jamie Oliver’s <a linkindex="56" href="http://www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/jamies-food-revolution" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.jamieoliver.com');"><em>Food Revolution</em></a> (an ABC series that revealed, among other things, that first-graders in Huntington, W.Va., couldn’t identify a <a linkindex="57" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGYs4KS_djg" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.youtube.com');" target="_blank">tomato from a potato</a>) to Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity <a linkindex="58" href="http://www.latimes.com/sns-health-michelle-obama-anti-obesity-initiative,0,876648.story" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.latimes.com');" target="_blank">campaign</a>.</p>
<p>The White House <a linkindex="59" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/childhood-obesity-task-force-unveils-action-plan-solving-problem-childhood-obesity-" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" target="_blank">Task Force on Childhood Obesity</a>, an outgrowth of Obama’s <a linkindex="60" href="http://www.letsmove.gov/" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.letsmove.gov');" target="_blank">Let’s Move!</a> initiative, last week presented its findings to the president. The <a href="http://www.letsmove.gov/tfco_fullreport_may2010.pdf" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.letsmove.gov');" target="_blank">report</a> suggests many of the answers to solving childhood obesity within a generation lie at school, where the First Lady points out many children consume as many as half their <a linkindex="61" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/first-lady-michelle-obama-launches-chefs-move-schools-program" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" target="_blank">daily calories</a>.</p>
<p>The report draws heavily on research from a 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture <a href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/ora/MENU/published/CNP/FILES/SNDAIII-SummaryofFindings.pdf" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.fns.usda.gov');" target="_blank">study</a> of school nutrition. The federal government establishes nutrition standards that schools must meet to receive federal reimbursement for meals. That USDA report found that nearly 94 percent of meals served in schools failed to meet all of the nutritional standards, even though most were meeting the <a href="http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/child/snp/nslp/lunch1.pdf" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.dpi.state.nd.us');" target="_blank">required meal patterns</a> (eight servings of bread per week, a half-cup of fruit and vegetables a day, etc).</p>
<p>During the 2004-05 school year, 100 percent of schools were serving kids all of their required protein, and most of their calcium. But 49 percent met the appropriate targets for calories and only 30 percent for saturated fat.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, while many offered healthier alternatives such as low-fat lunches, students seldom picked up that option. And french fries accounted disproportionately for the available vegetables.</p>
<p>The task force report identifies a number of culprits: School kitchens are ill-equipped and underfunded, cafeteria workers need better training, and nutrition education has been ignored. To illustrate how easy it is to nudge a child’s nutrition choices, the report cites <a linkindex="62" href="http://archive.sesameworkshop.org/aboutus/inside_press.php?contentId=15092302" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/archive.sesameworkshop.org');" target="_blank">research</a> from the Sesame Street Workshop.</p>
<p>In that study, 22 percent of preschoolers opted for broccoli over a Hershey’s chocolate bar. But 50 percent went for the broccoli when it had an Elmo sticker on it. (Therein lies a double-edged lesson about both the power of corporate marketing, and the potential influence for good grown-ups can wield steering kids to the right choices.)</p>
<p>In one creative solution, the First Lady announced last week a new USDA program to pair <a linkindex="63" href="http://healthymeals.nal.usda.gov/nal_display/index.php?tax_level=1&amp;info_center=14&amp;tax_subject=225" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/healthymeals.nal.usda.gov');" target="_blank">chefs</a> with local schools to educate kids and spruce up menus in a version of the Jamie Oliver model.</p>
<p>Two of the biggest obstacles, though, are structural. The current nutritional guidelines that schools must meet were established in 1995. Last October, an Institute of Medicine <a linkindex="64" href="http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2009/School-Meals-Building-Blocks-for-Healthy-Children.aspx" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.iom.edu');" target="_blank">report</a> proposed rewriting them to focus more on reducing sodium and saturated fat and increasing fruits, vegetables and whole grains.</p>
<p>The other issue — and it’s the most thorny — is money. The <a href="http://ag.senate.gov/Legislation/FULLCNB10.pdf" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/ag.senate.gov');" target="_blank">Healthy, Hunger-Free School Kids Act of 2010</a>, the proposed reauthorization, would require the USDA to rewrite nutrition standards as recommended by the IOM. And it would boost funding by $4.5 billion over the next 10 years. But schools that meet the new requirements would only get a boost of 6 cents per meal.</p>
<p>It’s unclear if that will be enough to train the cafeteria workers who will be using newly purchased equipment to prepare more expensive food.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Thu, 27 May 2010 11:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com662368 at http://www.alternet.orgFoodFoodfoodnutritionobesityschool lunchchildhood obesityObama Has Gone Contest Crazyhttp://www.alternet.org/story/146825/obama_has_gone_contest_crazy
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The White House is using competition as a soft-power method to drive change from offices to schools to statehouses and beyond.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n late 2008, the Obama inaugural committee announced a classic <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.google.com');" href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iBolndZU6UYpO80rEHy-pn8EjH0g">contest</a> straight out of Super Bowl sweepstakes season: Submit an essay on what this inauguration means to you, and you and a guest could win an all-expenses-paid trip to this once-in-a-lifetime event!</p>
<p>It was a sweet reward for 10 lucky Obamamaniacs and friends, capping the candidate’s campaign theme of grassroots participation-by-Internet (you could, of course, submit your <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/today.msnbc.msn.com');" href="http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/28537314/">essay</a> online).</p>
<p>In retrospect, the open call was a glimpse of strategy to come. Over the past year, the Obama administration has had states competing for lucrative education <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www2.ed.gov');" href="http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html">grants</a>, federal employees competing to identify government <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/save/SaveAwardHomePage/">waste</a>, engineers competing to design NASA <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.nasa.gov');" href="http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/innovation_incubator/centennial_challenges/astronaut_glove/index.html">gear</a> and school kids competing for a presidential commencement <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/commencement">address</a>. (That last contest, again, elevated the art of <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/commencement/essays#BlueValley">essay writing</a>.)</p>
<p>Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a contest to see which energy-efficient commercial buildings could trim the most <a target="_blank" href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/buildings-compete-to-work-off-the-waste-15203/">kilowatt hours</a>. And this week, the Department of Commerce announced the <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.tnr.com');" href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-avenue/prizing-innovation">i6 Challenge</a>, a $12 million interagency competition to see who could design the best innovation ecosystems to fast-track technology research and design to commercialization.</p>
<p>“They do like contests,” said <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.brookings.edu');" href="http://www.brookings.edu/experts/westd.aspx">Darrell West</a>, the director of governance studies at <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.brookings.edu');" href="http://www.brookings.edu/">Brookings</a>, with whom we checked to make sure we weren’t inventing a bogus presidential trend story. “It’s a way to engage the community in innovation, and they think that they have gotten good ideas out of this.”</p>
<p>The strategy is savvy on a number of fronts, expanding government participation and the pool of ideas beyond bureaucrats. And what Republican could quibble with the concept of mining solutions and rewarding entrepreneurs (or school kids) in the mini free market of competition?</p>
<p>A contest cleverly nudges the behavior of everyone involved, not just the winners. The Department of Education clearly had this in mind with the Race to the Top competition. Delaware and Tennessee were the sole <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/online.wsj.com');" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304370304575151682457897668.html">winners</a> of the first round of stimulus education grants, but three dozen other states have already begun conforming to Arne Duncan’s vision of school reform in their bids to be considered.</p>
<p>Duncan and Obama didn’t even have to get Congress involved in the act.</p>
<p>Similarly, a lone Veterans Affairs <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/save-award">staffer</a> won the competition to identify a solvable piece of government waste. But 38,000 other government employees were engaged in the message that effective government works as much from the bottom up as the top down. And the only carrot Obama had to hold up was … <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/save-award">himself</a>.</p>
<p>As with the students at <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/kalamazoo-central-high-school-wins-commencement-challenge">Kalamazoo Central High School</a>, who this week won the commencement challenge, that VA staffer simply won a little face time with the president, no great expenditure for the federal government.</p>
<p>Which brings up another benefit: Competitions are cost-effective (doubly so for the cost-effective competitions designed to identify cost-effective ideas).</p>
<p>With competitions, the government gets to “establish a goal without determining who is in the best position to reach the goal or what the most promising technical approach is,” concluded a 2006 Hamilton Project <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.brookings.edu');" href="http://www.brookings.edu/%7E/media/Files/rc/papers/2006/12healthcare_kalil/200612kalil.pdf">report</a> urging greater use of government prizes for technological innovation. Even better, it added, “The government only pays the prize money if someone is successful.”</p>
<p>NASA and the <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.darpa.mil');" href="http://www.darpa.mil/">Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency</a> were early proponents of contests to spur new technology, predating the Obama administration. But the Internet has opened up the concept to everyone from scientists to State Department employees, on every issue from education reform to energy conservation.</p>
<p>Today, a contest is announced on a <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/13/grand-challenges-21st-century-your-ideas-welcome">blog</a>. Contestants are encouraged to <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/twitter.com');" href="http://twitter.com/whitehouse">hashtag</a> their submissions on Twitter. Then all of cyberspace can <a target="_blank" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.whitehouse.gov');" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/greengov">vote</a> on the best ones in a democratic poll.</p>
<p>The contest craze, then, isn’t so much a reflection of Obama’s particular governing style as it is the Internet age in which he is governing.</p>
<p>“The genie is out of the bottle,” West said. “There’s going to be much greater grassroots involvement than we’ve had in the past, and I don’t think a new administration is going to change that. It really is broader than any particular administration. It’s societal.”</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C. area who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor. She previously covered college sports for the Orlando Sentinel and lived and reported in France. </div></div></div>Tue, 11 May 2010 21:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com662179 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsNews & Politicsobamawhite housecontests10 Things You Didn't Know Were in the Health Care Billhttp://www.alternet.org/story/146282/10_things_you_didn%27t_know_were_in_the_health_care_bill
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Calorie counts? A disclosure of swag Big Pharma reps give doctors? Abstinence education? Here are some surprising items in the health care bill.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>The 2,000-page <a href="http://www.opencongress.org/senate_health_care_bill?version=enr&amp;nid=t0:enr:574">health care bill</a> that became law the week before last is packed with major reforms probably well known (in concept if not in detail) by anyone who has channel-surfed through the nightly news over the past year. There’s an individual mandate, a system of exchanges, new government subsidies and a ban on some of the worst practices of the insurance industry.</p>
<p>Let’s say the small print on the big stuff accounts for about 1,500 pages, give or take a ream. What’s in the rest? Some random, weird and interesting solutions to problems you may or may not have known you had, some with dubious connection to health care at best. As a public service, we explain some of them here.</p>
<p>The Idea Lobby lists these provisions without endorsement or critique (although cobbling them all together on a single page does make the aggregate look a little scatterbrained). But, rest assured, someone in the know championed hard for each one: the <a href="http://www.cspinet.org/">Center for Science in the Public Interest</a>, <a href="http://www.nihb.org/">National Indian Health Board</a>, the <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.nccnhr.org');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.nccnhr.org/">National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term </a>Care. </p>
<div style="text-align: center;"> </div>
<p><strong>1. Menu labeling.</strong> The legislation mandates that national chains with at least 20 restaurants must post “nutrient content disclosure statements” — in other words, <a href="http://www.cspinet.org/new/201003211.html">calorie counts</a> right next to the menu offering “Big Mac.” To drive the point home, menus will also have to mention your suggested daily caloric intake. The provision has all kinds of addendums to deal with seasonal specials, salad bars, vending machines and condiments, but the main idea is this: Maybe we’ll eat less garbage if we can’t remain willfully <a target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/nutrition-info-with-that-3734/">ignorant</a> about how bad it is for us.</p>
<p><strong>2. Swag disclosure. </strong>The bill contains key elements of the <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.govtrack.us');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-301">Physician Payments Sunshine Act</a>, a previously bipartisan idea calling for pharmaceutical reps and device manufacturers to disclose all the <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.prescriptionproject.org');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.prescriptionproject.org/news?id=0118">goodies</a> they give doctors. This includes money, gifts, food, travel, entertainment, grants, just about anything that may constitute a conflict of interest. The “transparency reports” must be submitted to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and will be posted on a publicly searchable Web site.</p>
<p><strong>3. Right to pump. </strong>Workplaces will have to provide “reasonable” break time and a private location — other than a bathroom — for breastfeeding mothers to pump breast milk for one year after the birth of a child. Women’s <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.now.org');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.now.org/nnt/fall-2006/breastfeeding.html">groups</a> have long <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/breastfeeding.blog.motherwear.com');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://breastfeeding.blog.motherwear.com/2010/03/will-health-care-reform-mean-a-national-pumpingatwork-right.html">sought</a> such guarantees, and this one will apply to all workplaces with the exception of employers with less than 50 employees, where the demand might create an “undue hardship.”</p>
<p><strong>4. Postpartum depression. </strong>In addressing another <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/perinatalpro.com');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://perinatalpro.com/blog/?p=788">priority</a> for women’s groups, the bill singles out the problem of postpartum depression for expanded funding, worker training, public education and research. The <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.nimh.nih.gov');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml">National Institute of Mental Health</a> is due to conduct a national longitudinal study of women with postpartum depression, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services must produce a study on the benefits of PPD screening.</p>
<p><strong>5. Tanning tax.</strong> Starting July 1 of this year, there will be a new 10 percent <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.upi.com');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/03/23/Reforms-tanning-bed-tax-may-save-lives/UPI-40121269402695/">excise tax</a> on indoor tanning services (in legislative speak, “a service employing any electronic product designed to incorporate [one] or more ultraviolet lamps and intended for the irradiation of an individual by ultraviolet radiation, with wavelengths in air between 200 and 400 nanometers, to induce skin tanning”). Something called <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.dermcoll.asn.au');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.dermcoll.asn.au/public/a-z_of_skin-phototherapy.asp">“phototherapy”</a> is excluded.</p>
<p><strong>6. Adoption credit.</strong> Beginning with your 2010 taxes, the federal <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.journalofaccountancy.com');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Web/20102724.htm">adoption credit</a> goes up by $1,000 to $13,170 per child and now becomes refundable. As one <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.creatingafamily.org');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.creatingafamily.org/blog/adoption-domestic-adoption-international-adoption-embryo-adoption-foster-care-adoption/adoption-tax-credit-extended-improved/">happy advocate</a> blogged, “I’m pretty creative in coming up with ways that adoption is good for all concerned, but even I think the connection of the adoption tax credit and health care is tenuous.”</p>
<p><strong>7. Indian health</strong>. The bill incorporates aspects of the <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.ihs.gov');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.ihs.gov/AdminMngrResources/reauthor/">Indian Health Care Improvement Act</a>, a goal of organizations who point out American Indians have the worst health <a href="http://www.nihb.org/docs/03212010/PR-03.21.10%20FINAL.pdf">disparities</a> of any minority group in the U.S., particularly dealing with suicide, alcoholism and tuberculosis. The law increases funding and support on tribal lands for behavioral health and substance abuse, health care worker recruitment and facilities construction.</p>
<p><strong>8. Background checks. </strong>The Secretary of Health and Human Services is tasked with developing a national system for conducting criminal background checks of prospective health care workers who would deal directly with patients in long-term care facilities or private homes. This is one of a suite of <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.nccnhr.org');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.nccnhr.org/sites/default/files/nccnhr/documents/NCCNHR-Press-Release-on-House-Health-Reform-Vote.pdf">changes</a> aimed at protecting seniors in nursing homes.</p>
<p><strong>9. Abstinence education</strong>. The bill restores <a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.washingtonpost.com');" target="_blank" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; " href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032602457.html?hpid=topnews">federal funding</a> for abstinence-only education, the sex-ed technique that urges students to wait until marriage (while eschewing talk of contraceptives). Researchers <a href="http://www.avert.org/abstinence.htm">dispute</a> the effectiveness of the strategy, and it was getting the cold shoulder from the Obama administration. The health reform bill, however, allocates $250 million for such programs over the next five years.</p>
<p><strong>10. Your W-2. </strong>Changes are coming to your tax paperwork. Come next January, the W-2 you receive from your employer (if, hopefully, you have one) will <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2232434/">include</a> the cost of employer-provided health care you probably have not quantified before. This will become much more relevant in 2018, when people with the so-called high-cost “Cadillac” <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124009951">plans</a> will have to start paying a hefty tax on it.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com661688 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & Politicshealthfatfast foodabstinencetaxesbreastfeedinghealth billcalorie countscadillac taxMany Still Believe That Saddam Hussein Was Behind 9/11, and Now We Have Some Idea Whyhttp://www.alternet.org/story/143731/many_still_believe_that_saddam_hussein_was_behind_9_11%2C_and_now_we_have_some_idea_why
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Researchers looking at beliefs about al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein have made some surprising discoveries about why peopl</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>President Obama has had a hard time dislodging misperceptions about his health care proposal — those stubborn beliefs that there are death panels and free care for illegal aliens that don't actually exist in the legislation. Recent research about the way people defend their faith in false information, though, suggests calling out the inaccuracies may not be all that effective in converting the suspicious.</p>
<p>Sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University examined an earlier case of deep commitment to the inaccurate: the belief, among many conservatives who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11.</p>
<p>Of 49 people included in the <a target="_blank" href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122260824/HTMLSTART">study</a> who believed in such a connection, only one shed the certainty when presented with prevailing evidence that it wasn't true.</p>
<p>The rest came up with an array of justifications for ignoring, discounting or simply disagreeing with contrary evidence — even when it came from President Bush himself.</p>
<p>"I was surprised at the diversity of it, what I kind of charitably call the creativity of it," said <a target="_blank" href="http://sociology.buffalo.edu/faculty_staff/faculty/hoffman/">Steve Hoffman</a>, one of the study's authors and now a visiting assistant professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo.</p>
<p>The voters weren't dupes of an elaborate misinformation campaign, the researchers concluded; rather, they were actively engaged in reasoning that the belief they already held was true.</p>
<p>This type of "motivated reasoning" — pursuing information that confirms what we already think and discarding the rest — helps explain why viewers gravitate toward partisan cable news and why we tend to see what we <a target="_blank" href="../../media/the-truthiness-of-the-colbert-report-1156">want</a> in <em>The Colbert Report</em>. But when it comes to justifying demonstrably false beliefs, the logic stretches even thinner.</p>
<p>By the time the interviews were conducted, just before the 2004 election, the Bush Administration was no longer <a target="_blank" href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html">muddling</a> a link between al-Qaeda and the Iraq war. The researchers chose the topic because, unlike other questions in politics, it had a correct answer.</p>
<p>Subjects were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of this Bush quote: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda."</p>
<p>The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.</p>
<p>"Well, I bet they say that the commission didn't have any proof of it," one subject responded, "but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that."</p>
<p>Reasoned another: "Saddam, I can't judge if he did what he's being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it."</p>
<p>Others declined to engage the information at all. Most curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?</p>
<p>The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.</p>
<p>Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war, just as it exists today in the health care debate.</p>
<p>"I do think there's something to be said about people like <a target="_blank" href="http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434">Sarah Palin</a>, and even more so <a target="_blank" href="http://iowaindependent.com/18456/grassley-government-shouldnt-decide-when-to-pull-the-plug-on-grandma">Chuck Grassley</a>, supporting this idea of death panels in a national forum," Hoffman said.</p>
<p>He won't credit them alone for the phenomenon, though.</p>
<p>"That kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the idea ... " he said. "Our argument is that people aren't just empty vessels. You don't just sort of open up their brains and dump false information in and they regurgitate it. They're actually active processing cognitive agents."</p>
<p>That view is more nuanced than the one held by many health care reform proponents — that citizens are only ill-informed because Rush Limbaugh makes them so. (For the record, the authors say justifying false beliefs extends equally to <a target="_blank" href="../../culture_society/morals-authority-1099">liberals</a>, who they hypothesize would behave similarly given a different set of issues.)</p>
<p>The alternate explanation raises queasy questions for the rest of society.</p>
<p>"I think we'd all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions," said <a target="_blank" href="http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu/">Andrew Perrin</a>, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study.</p>
<p>That some people might not do that even in the face of accurate information, the authors suggest in their article, presents "a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice."</p>
<p>"The implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there's no question in my mind about that," Perrin said. "What it means is that we have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular ways."</p>
<p>Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their <a target="_blank" href="../../mediator/birther-controversy-1378">minds</a>. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the <a target="_blank" href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/10/mortality_salience.php">fear</a> that often clouds a person's ability to assess facts and that has characterized the current health care debate.</p>
<p>Hoffman's advice for crafting such an environment: "The congressional town hall meetings, that is a sort of test case in how not to do it."</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C. area who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor. </div></div></div>Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:00:01 -0800Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com659121 at http://www.alternet.orgMediaMediaal qaedasaddam husseinbeliefWant to Inspire Action on Climate Change? What We Need Is a Little Salesmanship and Psychologyhttp://www.alternet.org/story/142957/want_to_inspire_action_on_climate_change_what_we_need_is_a_little_salesmanship_and_psychology
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Overcoming inertia on climate change is unlikely to take place through hectoring and lecturing.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p><span>
<p>Sometime in the last decade, as mainstream science has outlined the man-made causes of climate change and as much of society has begun to accept that view, global warming has turned into a people problem as much as a technical and scientific one.</p>
<p>People have fed the increase in greenhouse gases, and people can reverse that trend through consumption choices large and small. One of the central paradoxes of climate change is not why the world is warming, but how people are handling it: If <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pollingreport.com/enviro.htm">polls</a> show so many believe a crisis is unfolding, why are so few doing anything about it?</p>
<p>NASA physicists probably couldn't answer that question. The people who can have rarely been asked. They are the behavioral experts, the psychologists who have long studied the disconnect between our attitudes and our actions, and who are now realizing themselves they have a role to play in climate policy.</p>
<p>If you consider that solving climate change requires adjusting human behavior on a vast scale — getting people to drive hybrids, weatherize their homes, cut their energy use, consider their carbon footprint — what's needed is a more effective campaign to get them to do so. Brow-beating isn't working. Psychologists know guilt is a terrible motivator. And moral arguments don't work on people who don't share your morals.</p>
<p>If a more nuanced understanding of human behavior has been used to push all kinds of products and ideas throughout the history of Madison Avenue, couldn't we use the same insights psychologists study and "Mad Men" apply to better sell the world on energy-efficient appliances and new environmental social norms?</p>
<p><strong>Attitudes Don't Matter</strong></p>
<p>Two years ago, the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.apa.org/">American Psychological Association</a> began thinking about this idea. <a target="_blank" href="http://psych.la.psu.edu/directory/faculty-bios/swim.html">Janet Swim</a>, a social psychologist at Penn State, suggested the APA create a task force to examine the relationship between psychology and climate change, two topics that weren't readily connected for many APA members, let alone the broader climate science community.</p>
<p>"When I first thought about this, I had a limited range of what psychology could do," Swim said. "I had no idea we'd end up with a 240-page report."</p>
<p>The <a target="_blank" href="http://www.apa.org/releases/climate-change.pdf">report</a>, released this summer, outlines what psychology gets about why we don't act on climate concerns and suggests research queries to guide policy in the future. It urges APA members to present what psychology can offer as "the missing pieces in climate change analyses."</p>
<p>The report assesses the current challenge as one of almost irrational human behavior.</p>
<p>"Just as one might puzzle over the collapse of vanished regional civilizations like the Maya of Central America, the Anasazi of North America, the Norse of Greenland, and the people of Easter Island," the report reads, "future generations may find it incomprehensible that people, particularly in industrialized countries, continued until well into the 21st century to engage in behavior that seriously compromised the habitability of their own countries and the planet."</p>
<p>Psychologists thankfully don't find this so incomprehensible. Many people fail to turn a theoretical concern for the climate into tangible action because the problem is imperceptible to anyone without climate-modeling software or satellite <a target="_blank" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5110742/Antarctica-ice-bridge-linking-islands-snaps.html">images</a> of Antarctica. That leaves many relying on mediators like journalists they may not be inclined to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2009/03/gallup-poll-more-americans/">trust</a>.</p>
<p>Psychologists understand that we also weigh concrete sacrifices in the present more heavily than distant, abstract benefits in the future. It's difficult to ask someone to give up his SUV now to make the planet more livable in 50 years.</p>
<p>"I sum it up a lot of times by saying, ‘It's not easy being green,'" said Paul Stern, director of the National Research Council's <a target="_blank" href="http://www7.nationalacademies.org/hdgc/">Committee on the Human Dimensions of Climate Change</a> and another contributor to the report. "You might want to be green, but it's hard to find out how, or sometimes you can't get the products you want."</p>
<p>It may also be hard to appreciate that our individual actions could put a dent in a problem so big. And climate change comes with inherent uncertainty, an excuse often used to continue putting personal good above the collective good. Scientists have an obligation to frame findings in the context of some endemic uncertainty, but in the process they contribute to one of the mechanisms we use to justify inaction.</p>
<p>Much of current climate policy not only ignores these factors, but is based on oversimplified assumptions about human behavior: that if government puts a financial incentive on the table, people will take it; that if a useful new technology emerges, people will adopt it; that if scientists preach the severity of the crisis, people will react accordingly.</p>
<p>"Some of this stuff is just sort of bad psychology, and some of it is not psychology at all," Stern said. "There are implicit underlying assumptions that are known to be wrong."</p>
<p>Many people like to believe they don't bow to social norms, but psychology suggests we all do. A more sophisticated view of behavior says that it's not just what we perceive will benefit us that matters, but how we believe other people will perceive us. Experiments in cleaning up roadside litter have found that removing most trash only marginally reduces future littering. Cleaning up every last bottle and candy wrapper, however, establishes the norm that littering is not something people do. People, therefore, stop doing it.</p>
<p>Another experiment found that a recycling program was more effective when one person was appointed head of the recycling group.</p>
<p>"Attitudes don't matter," said <a target="_blank" href="http://psychology.nd.edu/people/faculty/howard-george/">George Howard</a>, a Notre Dame psychology professor. "There's been a lot of research that says it doesn't matter if you're pro- or anti-recycling. The most important thing is if you have somebody looking over your shoulder."</p>
<p><span>
<p>An affective home weatherization program might point out how many of your neighbors have already taken advantage of a free energy audit, or how much money they're all saving that you're not. Environmental campaigns that try to motivate people by portraying how little others are doing may backfire; they instead paint a world where the norm is inaction.</p>
<p>Psychological research also warns that fear, guilt and sacrifice — the three tenets of many environmental campaigns — are tough sells. Psychology's recommendation here reads straight out of a marketing handbook: Reframe the choices.</p>
<p>One <a target="_blank" href="http://davidhardisty.info/downloads/carbon-framing-2.1.doc">study</a> found that 65 percent of Republicans were willing to pay a carbon dioxide reduction fee on an airline ticket when it was labeled a "carbon offset." Only 27 percent were willing pay for a "carbon tax."</p>
<p>The very problem itself has already been reframed once, from "global warming" to "climate change," a broader moniker that also makes the prospect seem less like a boon for places like Siberia that might not mind a little more warmth.</p>
<p>Psychologists could help reframe behavior change as benefits to the environment instead of sacrifices to ourselves. They could take advantage of what we often forget about the importance of social norms. They could design programs that are easier to participate in than not, in the way that opt-out organ donor programs are more successful than opt-in ones. And they could explain, in detail specific to your home and your budget, why a government tax credit to put solar panels on your roof would benefit you and how long it would take you to recoup your investment.</p>
<p>"If psychologists would find ways of educating people so that in the end they say, ‘Wow that sounds like a great decision, put them on my house,'" Howard said, "that would be a hell of a contribution."</p>
<p><strong>Czar Czaniness</strong><br />
Marketing is obviously not a new idea.</p>
<p>"Companies have moved past ‘here, we have a washing machine, come buy it if you want it,'" said <a target="_blank" href="http://www.wooster.edu/en/Academics/Areas-of-Study/Psychology/Faculty-and-Staff/Susan-Clayton.aspxa">Susan Clayton</a>, psychology professor at the College of Wooster and another task force member. "It's not just presenting it; it's telling people about it, selling it."</p>
<p>But the thought that psychologists would help sell behavior change benefiting the environment has touched a terrified nerve with some. Congressman <a href="http://www.baird.house.gov/">Brian Baird</a>, D-Wash., sponsored a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-3247">bill</a> this summer to create a social and behavioral research program within the Department of Energy for just the kind of research the APA is advocating. The bill passed out of the House Committee on Science and Technology along <a target="_blank" href="http://gop.science.house.gov/PressRoom/Item.aspx?ID=183">party lines</a> before the August recess and then took a strange leap onto cable news.</p>
<p>"Government is gearing up to conduct one of the biggest scientific experiments ever, and you get to be a part of it," conservative Fox News commentator Glenn Beck <a target="_blank" href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,535927,00.html">warned</a> his audience. He described the bill — to be funded at a relatively modest $10 million a year — as an attempt at mind control out of the realm of science fiction like the Orwellian classic <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four"><em>1984</em></a> and complete with a behavior modification "czar."</p>
<p>"There's sort of a misunderstandings, a fearful overreaction to getting psychology involved," Clayton said. "It's not like it's specific to conservation psychology or psychology about climate change, it's part of the way people respond to psychology in general. Somehow, when advertising is trying to persuade you of something, that's normal; when psychology gets involved, it's scary and inappropriate."</p>
<p>That misunderstanding, though, may be rooted as much in the counter-marketing of influencers like Beck, for whom a Prius is a marker of the ideologically impure. "They're going to study us and find ways to essentially trick us into driving crappy hybrids," he said on the show, "and I bet that's just the beginning."</p>
<p>Psychology's response is to appreciate the difference between a Glenn Beck viewer and a Sierra Club member, and to tailor the message accordingly. One challenge is to bring the behavior in line with the people who already are believers; for the non-believers, Clayton suggested, psychology isn't so much interested in changing their minds as changing their behaviors. Fuel-efficient cars may appeal to them to save money, not to save polar bears - and if they never draw a connection between the two, that's OK.</p>
<p>Swim also cautioned that there exists more than just a dichotomy between the environmental faithful and non-faithful. One Yale <a target="_blank" href="http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/SixAmericas2009.pdf">study</a> pegged the American public into six groups in our reaction to climate change: the alarmed (18 percent), the concerned (33 percent), the cautious (19 percent), the disengaged (12 percent), the doubtful (11 percent) and the dismissive (7 percent).</p>
<p>Psychology has to combat other public relations problems, chief among them the perception — hard problems are solved only by the natural sciences — that may have kept climate policymakers away from the field so far. But the political fear may be hardest to overcome.</p>
<p>The DOE did conduct behavioral research in the '70s, in the midst of a different energy crisis. President Reagan killed the program, pushing many researchers like Stern out of the field, and pushing most of the work on the topic in the last decade into Europe. As a consequence, Stern said Baird's bill would create this type of federal research at the DOE for the first time in 25 years.</p>
<p>"If the DOE had a different self-image, it could have done a lot of this stuff out of the political limelight, and it would have been fine," Stern said. "Their self-image is that they're a technology agency, they develop hot new technologies. They're not about implementation, not about this messy stuff, people and so forth."</p>
<p>Psychology may have to start then with this pitch: selling Washington on why it has at least some of the answers.</p>
</span></p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C. area who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor. </div></div></div>Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com658779 at http://www.alternet.orgEnvironmentEnvironmentpsychologyenivronmentGoing Green Means Having Fewer Kidshttp://www.alternet.org/story/143342/going_green_means_having_fewer_kids
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">There are already just too many people on the planet. What are we supposed to do about it?</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Andrew Revkin, an environmental reporter for <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> and author of the paper's <a href="http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/" linkindex="32" target="_blank">Dot Earth blog</a>, warns that the math is pretty depressing.</p>
<p>There are about 6.8 billion people on the planet today, a number projected to get to <a href="http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2008/pressrelease.pdf" target="_blank">9 billion</a> by 2050. Americans, the world's greatest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, produce about 20 tons of the stuff per person, per year. If we were to cut that in half, as emissions rose with the quality of life in much of the Third World, and everyone on the planet met around 10 tons per person, per year, simple multiplication says we'd collectively emit 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually come 2050.</p>
<p>That's three times the already problematic current number.</p>
<p>When we start to think about that number, 9 billion, a lot of "cheery suppositions" about what the world can do to curb climate change evaporate, Revkin said (via carbon footprint-minimizing Skype from his desk in New York). He spoke to an event in Washington discussing population trends and climate change, and the media that seldom correlate the two.</p>
<p>The interrelated topics aren't likely to get much talk when global leaders meet in <a href="http://en.cop15.dk/" linkindex="33" target="_blank">Copenhagen</a> in December for the next round of wrangling over a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But at least the media could start highlighting the sensitive relationship, as was suggested at the talk hosted by the <a href="http://www.wilsoncenter.org/" linkindex="34" target="_blank">Woodrow Wilson Center</a>.</p>
<p>A couple of mental roadblocks emerge, central among them the sentiment that, well, there are just too many people on the planet, so what are we supposed to do about it? Any answer trips up against the politically touchy topic of family planning (a distinctly different concept, reproductive-health advocates stress, from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_control" linkindex="35" target="_blank">"population control"</a>).</p>
<p>"The single most concrete, substantive thing a young American could do is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius," Revkin said. "It's having fewer kids."</p>
<p>But this is just a thought exercise, he cautions, and no model for the kind of official policy most Americans would want to live with. A recent <a href="http://www.optimumpopulation.org/reducingemissions.pdf" target="_blank">study</a>, though, by the London School of Economics and the British-based <a href="http://www.optimumpopulation.org/" linkindex="36" target="_blank">Optimum Population Trust</a>, suggests meeting the world's unmet need for access to reproductive health would be the most effective and cheapest way to start dramatically cutting carbon dioxide.</p>
<p>Each $7 spent on basic family planning between now and 2050 would reduce emissions by more than a ton, the research says. To get the same reduction through alternative energy would cost at least $32 (or, as much as $83 to implement carbon capture and <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/science_environment/clean-coal-by-any-other-name-1084" linkindex="37" target="_blank">storage</a> in coal plants, $92 to develop plug-in hybrids, or $131 for <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/business_economics/In-Praise-of-the-Electric-Car-900" linkindex="38" target="_blank">electric vehicles</a>).</p>
<p>Providing such family planning over the next four decades would be the equivalent of reducing global CO2 by six times America's annual emissions.</p>
<p>All of this, though, assumes there's nothing controversial about getting birth control to rural Africa. Not that the conversation has to start with The Pill: Wherever women have been given access to reproductive health around the world, they have tended to opt for fewer children than they would have had otherwise, meaning that access has a controlling effect without being coercive.</p>
<p>Emily Douglas, Web editor at the liberal magazine <a href="http://www.thenation.com/" linkindex="39" target="_blank"><em>The Nation</em></a> and previously an editor at <a href="http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/" linkindex="40" target="_blank">RHRealityCheck</a>, suggested some historical context: World population projections were revised downward after the widespread dissemination of birth control in the West. Officials once predicted the trend would follow as birth control was made available to the Third World.</p>
<p>"But that assumption turned out to be false," Douglas said.</p>
<p>And so politicians head to Copenhagen with the most cost-effective solution to climate change (one piece, of course, of a broader menu) just as divisive as any other, inseparable from a web of policy problems that grows more connected to the climate by the day.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com658748 at http://www.alternet.orgNews & PoliticsLGBTQEnvironmentenvironmentbabiespopulationreproductiongreenhouseglobal warningWhy Diversity on the Dinner Plate Is Becoming an Endangered Specieshttp://www.alternet.org/story/141621/why_diversity_on_the_dinner_plate_is_becoming_an_endangered_species
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Our food has become so homogeneous we are in danger of losing the biodiversity we&#039;ll need to survive.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Americans once grew and ate 15,000 varieties of apple, each different in name, taste and texture. What's left today are about 10 percent of those varieties, the rest consigned to a fate people seldom associate with food.</p>
<p>"The idea of endangered species is pretty well established; people understand that a particular <a href="http://www.fws.gov/sacramento/es/animal_spp_acct/california_tiger_salamander.pdf" target="_blank">salamander</a> might be endangered," said Jenny Trotter, who heads the biodiversity programs at <a linkindex="32" href="http://www.slowfoodusa.org/" target="_blank">Slow Food USA</a>. But endangered apples -- that's an idea few eaters recognize even as biologists sound a growing alarm about the rapid loss of genetic biodiversity in the global food supply.</p>
<p>Seventy-five percent of the world's food now comes from seven crops: wheat, rice, corn, potato, barley, cassava and sorghum. And it increasingly comes from narrow strains of those crops selected for efficiency in producing the most food on the smallest patch of land in the least amount of time.</p>
<p>Fine diners have come to recognize an alternative in "heirloom" tomatoes, a term denoting generations of conservation by farmers who can trace the origin of a unique seed's selected breeding by as much as centuries.</p>
<p>The same concept, though rarely appearing on farms -- and even more rarely marketed on menus -- applies to grains and lettuces and pears. Even cows. But today, <a linkindex="33" href="http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/heritage/" target="_blank">99 percent</a> of turkeys eaten in America come from a single breed, the Broad-Breasted White. More than 80 percent of dairy cows are Holsteins and 75 percent of pigs come from just three breeds.</p>
<p>In the winnowing of efficiency, "heirloom" and "heritage" landraces are disappearing, taking with them their diverse genes and, scientists argue, man's best chances for survival. Please recall, they all suggest, the <a linkindex="34" href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/294137/Irish-Potato-Famine" target="_blank">Irish potato famine</a>. More recent epidemics have threatened entire regional industries as well as grocery-store produce: the billion-dollar 1970 <a linkindex="35" href="http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.py.10.090172.000345?journalCode=phyto" target="_blank">corn blight</a>, the 1984 Florida <a linkindex="36" href="http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/02/us/florida-still-struggles-over-the-citrus-canker.html" target="_blank">citrus canker</a>, and the <a linkindex="37" href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-wheat-rust14-2009jun14,0,1751268.story?page=1" target="_blank">wheat stem rust</a>, which may yet do its worst damage.</p>
<p>Blights, viruses and insects evolve over time to counter agricultural repellants, meaning crops will have to evolve over time, too. And today, as climate change promises to target agriculture, more than ever farmers may need to rely on the untapped genes of crops that grow on little water or in high heat, or livestock that can forage on grass should the price of the corn we feed them go up from competition with biofuels.</p>
<p>We've also come to rely on some food sources -- that Broad-Breasted White turkey, for example -- that can no longer naturally reproduce. Which seems biologically troubling, right?</p>
<p>"It's a question that needs to be asked, and if our entire food system is based on that resource, that becomes a question we can no longer ask," said <a linkindex="38" href="http://www.vetmed.vt.edu/org/dbsp/faculty/sponenberg.asp" target="_blank">Phil Sponenberg</a>, a professor of pathology and genetics at Virginia Tech and an adviser to the <a linkindex="39" href="http://www.albc-usa.org/" target="_blank">American Livestock Breeds Conservancy</a>. "For turkey production, if all we had were artificially inseminated industrial turkeys, and all of a sudden, if we want to say, 'Is this how we should be raising turkeys?' it becomes increasingly difficult to ask that question."</p>
<p>Alternative ways of raising turkeys, in other words, would no longer be an option.</p>
<p>"I just like the idea of all the options being on the table," Sponenberg said.</p>
<p>His suggestion for keeping them there is laughably simple.</p>
<p>"We have to eat them to save them,'" said Jennifer Kendall, the ALBC's manager of marketing and communications.</p>
<p>In an era when many problems -- deforestation, climate change, water shortages -- have been caused by human over-consumption, here is a problem of under-consumption. Biodiversity is disappearing precisely because people no longer consume it, and if we would just eat endangered crops and livestock now, restoring their role in the food supply, we could save them from extinction.</p>
<p><strong>Culinary Assistance</strong><br />
Endangered heritage breeds have one saving grace: They're generally tasty. Because of this, an odd collection of interest groups -- U.N. bureaucrats, conservation scientists, small farmers and foodies -- have coalesced around the eat-'em-to-save-'em strategy.</p>
<p>Slow Food USA works alongside the ALBC, the <a linkindex="40" href="http://www.seedsavers.org/" target="_blank">Seed Savers Exchange</a> and the nonprofit <a linkindex="41" href="http://chefscollaborative.org/" target="_blank">Chefs Collaborative</a>, all of which also fall under the "Restoring America's Food Traditions" alliance founded by Arizona professor <a linkindex="42" href="http://www.garynabhan.com/" target="_blank">Gary Nabhan</a>.</p>
<p>RAFT, with the lead of Chefs Collaborative, this spring launched a pilot program in New England connecting small farms with local restaurants for the purpose of growing, serving and promoting 16 regionally specific heritage breeds of vegetable in danger of disappearing. Among the <a linkindex="43" href="http://chefscollaborative.org/raft-grow-out/raft-grow-out-vegetable-varieties/" target="_blank">varieties</a>: Boothby's blond cucumber, early blood-rooted turnip beet, Jimmy Nardello's sweet Italian frying pepper and the Siberian sweet watermelon.</p>
<p>Rich Garcia, the executive chef at <a linkindex="44" href="http://www.tastingswinebarandbistro.com/home/" target="_blank">Tastings Wine Bar and Bistro</a> in Foxboro, Mass., is already plating the speckled lettuce, a hearty leaf similar to romaine that has natural brown spots a non-foodie might mistake for bad news. Garcia knows all of the farmers and fishermen his food comes from in an effort to remove the restaurant from the industrial-scale production and distribution system that has elbowed much biodiversity out of the food supply.</p>
<p>"I can trace my meat from my restaurant all the way back to where it was raised, what it was fed, how long it was with its mother," he said. "It gets kind of crazy some of the information you can get."</p>
<p>The restaurant's servers are prepared to pass that information on to diners, explaining why they can't have an out-of-season tomato on their burger in April, or why the pairing in-season is labeled on the menu as a "trophy tomato." Identify a heritage breed by name, Garcia says, and you pique diners' curiosity. Servers then have an in to tell the "story" of a food, a buzzword for advocates from the ALBC to Chefs Collaborative. The story of the speckled lettuce is one of a plant dating to the 1660s in Holland and grown locally in New England for 200 years.</p>
<p>The premise of the project is that chefs man the front lines of food trends, and that they're essential to bridge the gap between speckled lettuces and a public that expects produce to look uniform and familiar. Heritage breeds are often, well, the funny-looking ones.</p>
<p>"We have to look back at the heirloom tomato as America's introduction to this concept, the original posterboy for biodiversity," said Evan Mallett, another chef participating in the Grow-Out at his restaurant, <a linkindex="45" href="http://www.blacktrumpetbistro.com/" target="_blank">Black Trumpet Bistro</a>, in Portsmouth, N.H. "I don't know if it's because I myself look physically imperfect, but I think I want everyone to look at a tomato that's deformed and see that it's more real. Nothing's been done to alter the tomato, and because of that, the tomato tastes like a pure tomato."</p>
<p>The pilot program addresses one of the main challenges around reviving near-extinct strands of edible biodiversity: Farmers need demand to raise these breeds, but the supply can't be marketed until the breed gets off the cusp of extinction. The Grow-Out controls for both supply and demand, with farmers agreeing to grow the vegetables for chefs who have ahead of time promised to buy them. The only trick was choosing near-endangered seeds, and not the last supply of an extinct breed.</p>
<p><strong>Naming the Niche Players</strong><br />
American consumers have been struck over the last decade by waves of food consciousness. First, it was "eat organically," and then "eat locally." The ALBC hopes the next frontier will be eating biodiversity, an idea that may have more meaning for the sustainability of the planet (and its people) than organics.</p>
<p>When it reaches the supermarket, the trend probably won't be labeled as "biodiverse," but with "heritage" and "heirloom" stamps -- or, better yet, by the names of individual breeds. Kendall wants you to walk into the grocery store and request not just a pork chop, but a <a linkindex="46" href="http://www.albc-usa.org/cpl/redwattle.html" target="_blank">Red Wattle</a> pork chop. The idea is not so far-fetched in Europe (or even in American cheese isles), where consumers identify regionally specific brands like Roquefort cheese or Bordeaux wine, or in Italy, where the <a linkindex="47" href="http://www.slowfood.com/" target="_blank">Slow Food</a> movement began.</p>
<p>The ALBC this April released a definition for "heritage" <a linkindex="48" href="http://www.albc-usa.org/heritagechicken/index.html" target="_blank">chickens</a>, following a 2005 effort with turkeys. The conservancy can't police whether farmers use the name faithfully, but it has begun the many-year process of introducing the label into the USDA's stable of adjectives like <a linkindex="49" href="http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateN&amp;navID=GrassFedMarketingClaimStandards&amp;rightNav1=GrassFedMarketingClaimStandards&amp;topNav=&amp;leftNav=GradingCertificationandVerfication&amp;page=GrassFedMarketingClaims&amp;resultType=&amp;acct=lss" target="_blank">"grass-fed."</a> </p>
<p>The turkey definition was easy, Kendall said: "Pretty much anything that was naturally mating was considered heritage."</p>
<p>The goal isn't to replace all the industrial turkeys that don't mate naturally. The ALBC doesn't think heritage breeds will feed the world; they are by definition not conducive to producing on a mass scale. The <a linkindex="50" href="http://www.fao.org/" target="_blank">United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization</a>, though, has closely tied biodiversity to the problem of <a linkindex="51" href="http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=12244&amp;Cr=food&amp;Cr1=" target="_blank">feeding</a> the world's burgeoning population. The loss of biodiversity, it says, threatens world food security as populations lose access to crops and animals adapted to specific corners of the globe.</p>
<p>In the U.S., what biodiversity advocates hope to create is a bigger niche where currently a very small one exists.</p>
<p>"They're going to be like how cranberries and maple syrup are in the American diet," Nabhan said. "We don't have them every day, but they become specially featured things we're willing to pay more for because they reinforce our heritage.</p>
<p>"The thing we forget," he added, "is that niche markets add up."</p>
<p>On the level of genetic diversity, Sponenberg said the picture looks vastly different when three breeds represent 60 percent of an animal population compared with 95 percent. Biodiversity just needs a piece of the pie, he said, so we still have those genetic resources if we ever need them.</p>
<p><a linkindex="52" href="http://www.fb.org/" target="_parent">The American Farm Bureau</a>, which represents the broader agriculture industry that is trying to feed the country, is OK with that, said Russell Williams, the Farm Bureau's director of regulatory relations.</p>
<p>"We're 100 percent for market-driven labeling," he said. "If there is a market for a heritage hamburger, or heritage steak, more power to them."</p>
<p>But the Farm Bureau opposes U.S. ratification of the 15-year-old <a linkindex="53" href="http://www.cbd.int/" target="_blank">U.N. Convention on Biodiversity</a>, which Williams fears would lead to a system in America where farmers growing heritage breeds receive subsidies at the expense of those who don't.</p>
<p>The Farm Bureau doesn't keep statistics on what breeds its growers use, considering the question an intrusion into farmers' competitive business decisions. And so biodiversity -- or the lack thereof -- is a non-issue.</p>
<p>"If that variety satisfies the market," Williams said of the breeds currently in use, "I would be hard-pressed to say we have to have a 50 percent mix of other varieties consumers aren't going to buy. What are farmers going to do if nobody buys them?"</p>
<p>Others argue existing agricultural subsidies have helped contribute to the loss of biodiversity in the first place, skewing a market where entire regions of the country grow only a single genetically modified corn crop.</p>
<p><a linkindex="54" href="http://www.ucsusa.org/news/experts/doug-gurian-sherman.html" target="_blank">Doug Gurian-Sherman</a>, a senior scientist with the <a linkindex="55" href="http://www.ucsusa.org/" target="_blank">Union of Concerned Scientists</a>, suggests that major policy shifts on subsidies and research funding are as important as shifting consumer consciousness. Growing food is unlike making cars or telephones because of the evolving element of biology. But, Gurian-Sherman said, America treats the industries the same, focusing on the limited goal of maximizing production at the expense of other factors like biodiversity.</p>
<p>"If we screw up with agriculture, with the growing world population and climate change, the consequences are not going to be the failure of a car company, whereby another car company can easily fill in for them," he said. "Eventually, the consequences are starvation. People need to understand the production of food is fundamentally different than the production of cars. I don't think as a society we've really grasped that."</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Emily Badger is a freelance writer living in Atlanta who has contributed to The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor. </div></div></div>Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com657066 at http://www.alternet.orgEnvironmentEnvironmentfoodbiodiversityWhat's So Threatening About Sotomayor's Real Life to Her Right-Wing Critics?http://www.alternet.org/story/140617/what%27s_so_threatening_about_sotomayor%27s_real_life_to_her_right-wing_critics
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">For over 120 years, the idea that a judge&#039;s background would influence how they approached cases was conventional wisdom. Why isn&#039;t it now?</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Sonia Sotomayor's critics and backers have spent recent weeks parsing one line of a speech she gave in 2001 during a conference at Berkeley on Latino representation on the judiciary. "I would hope," she said, "that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."</p><p>The quote prompted <a target="_blank" href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/26/limbaugh-slams-sotomayor-reverse-racist/">cannon fire</a> from Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who equated the sentiment with a kind of racism (although Gingrich later <a target="_blank" href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-sotomayor-gingrich4-2009jun04,0,6710122.story">dialed back</a> his rhetoric). Equally telling has been the reaction to the reaction — the White House and Sotomayor's Democratic supporters have <a target="_blank" href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/white-house-judge-sotomayor-acknowledges-poor-word-choice/">backtracked</a> on the seemingly simple idea that what she would bring to the Supreme Court is not just her Yale law degree, but also her Bronx-Puerto Rican life narrative.</p><p>"What she said was, of course, one's life experience shapes who you are, but ultimately and completely — and she used those words 'ultimately and completely' — as a judge you follow the law," Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/politics/03judge.html?hp">recounted</a> to the media after he met with Sotomayor last week. "There's only one law. And she said 'ultimately and completely,' a judge has to follow the law no matter what their upbringing has been."</p><p>Leahy's comments, as much as Limbaugh's, put life experience and faithfulness to the law on opposite ends of a spectrum of judicial influence, suggesting a judge can draw from one or the other, but not both. In fact the opposite view — that justices inherently sift cases through their varying worldviews — prevailed throughout the last century (and even in a Supreme Court decision <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2220031/">this week</a>), prompting a couple of questions ahead of Sotomayor's confirmation hearings this summer:</p><p>Why is this idea suddenly so thorny? And don't we want a Supreme Court staffed with jurists who have a common deference to the Constitution but a varying set of backgrounds from which to approach it?</p><p>From the 1880s until about 2000, said Harvard law professor and Supreme Court historian <a target="_blank" href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/index.html?id=534">Mark Tushnet</a>, the idea that a judge's background would influence how he or she approached cases — and that this was desirable — was conventional wisdom. The court for years even followed a kind of enforced diversity, drawing justices from the geographic regions that captured some of the country's biggest disagreements, with plantation owners in the South, industrialists in the Northeast and ranchers to the West.</p><p>Other types of biography weighed heavily, too. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.californiawestern.edu/main/default.asp?nav=faculty.asp&amp;header=faculty.gif&amp;body=belknap/home.asp">Michal Belknap</a>, a historian and law professor at California Western School of Law, is writing a biography of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.oyez.org/justices/tom_c_clark">Justice Tom Clark</a>, who was appointed to the court in 1949 after practicing oil and gas law.</p><p>"As far as I'm aware," Belknap said, "nobody ever asked him whether his background as an oil and gas lawyer would influence his thinking in oil and gas cases. The reason they gave them to him was that he was the only person who could understand those cases."</p><p>That a similar concept would apply now to a justice with a personal understanding of issues of immigration, racism or poverty — "It seems to me like something that's fairly obvious," Belknap said. "And probably the only difference between (Sotomayor) and other people is she actually said in a fairly prominent public context something that I think most lawyers, judges and law professors would think is obvious and self-evidently true."</p><p>The idea that justices should mechanically apply the law through a lens in no way colored by their own experience Tushnet chalks up to a successful conservative political strategy. Opponents say the view ignores two complications: Language is inherently ambiguous, and if the Constitution or statutes held indisputable answers to these cases, they wouldn't be in the Supreme Court in the first place.</p><p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/guinier/">Lani Guinier</a>, a Harvard law professor, also sets the shift inside a broader debate around <a target="_blank" href="http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2003_fall/originalism.htm">originalism</a>, the idea that the Constitution is a fixed document judges must read through the eyes of its creators and not with a view toward contemporary society.</p><p>"The idea of originalism makes the notion of a judge relying on anything other than the historical record verboten," she said. "And in fact judges who interpret the Constitution in conjunction with anything else other than the historical record are called judicial activists. What you're really seeing here is the morphing of that debate on judicial activism."</p><p><strong>'A Mathematical Fact'</strong><br /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Espage/">Scott Page</a>, a professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan, has been explaining through math this same concept that Belknap accepts as self-evident: that problem-solvers are inherently influenced by their background, and that a multitude of backgrounds helps a group more often arrive at the right answer.</p><p>Sotomayor's supporters — and Sotomayor herself, in the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html?pagewanted=all">full text</a> of her Berkeley speech — aren't suggesting that she'll apply some Latina brand of law, just as justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Thurgood Marshall didn't read the Constitution differently as a woman and an African-American. Rather, they may have read the facts of a case differently, emphasizing a factor it might not occur to another judge to examine.</p><p>Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently illustrated this in the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/us/24savana.html">case</a> of a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched at school. The girl's humiliation weighed heavily on Ginsburg but not, she criticized, on her male colleagues, who didn't recognize what such an event might feel like: "They have never been a 13-year-old girl," Ginsburg <a target="_blank" href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2009-05-05-ruthginsburg_N.htm">said</a> of the other eight justices.<br /><br />"There's strong evidence that based on ethnicity, training, education, age, we're going to parse things differently," Page said. "I'm likely to say, 'this is like a<em>Brady Bunch</em> episode.' Someone else is likely to say, 'this is like <em>There's Something About Mary</em>."<br /><br />Page has tried to study the value of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Espage/thedifference.html">diversity</a> when people with different ways of parsing things work together. No one person can be diverse, he starts by explaining; you can only be diverse relative to other people. Much empirical work on the benefits of diversity have the flaw, he said, of measuring activities people work on side-by-side but not together. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, is the perfect example of a kind of collective problem-solving group where the blind spots of one individual may be filled out by another's expertise.</p><p>"This isn't like the mantra 'two eggs are better than one,'" Page said. "It's a mathematical fact; it's like the Pythagorean theorem, a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared. You can show the group's error equals the average error of the people in the group minus their diversity, which is just the differences in how they predict outcomes."</p><p>The more highly dimensional the problem, he says — i.e., Supreme Court cases — the more the theorem has bite.</p><p>"The formula says, 'How different is your prediction than my prediction?'" Page said. "That's mathematical fact. The empirical question is: What would cause us to see the world differently?"</p><p>Belknap might point out that, obviously, it's our different backgrounds — Sonia Sotomayor's childhood raised by a single mother in a Bronx project compared to John Roberts' childhood as a boarding-school student and the son of a steel plant manager.</p><p>In Sotomayor's original quote, she was stressing more the value of her experiences than the novelty of her ethnicity.</p><p>"What's really important about that quote — and I think many of us do this automatically — we assume a false parallelism she was actually not making," Guinier said. Sotomayor was not comparing a wise Latina to a wise white man, although many assumed the word appeared twice in the quote. "She's comparing someone who has a rich set of experiences and can use them to someone who is not wise."</p><p>"You could read into her quote," Guinier added, "the Scott Page view of diversity."</p><p><strong>One Kind of Homogeneity</strong><br />That view emphasizes not just the differences apparent in a photo of the potential new Supreme Court, which will have one African American, two women and a Hispanic if Sotomayor is confirmed. Equally important are all the ways in which their biographies differ, contributing to the collective breadth of life experience.</p><p>Sotomayor would actually be contributing to one kind of homogeneity on the court: It is increasingly <a target="_blank" href="../../../legal_affairs/return-balance-to-the-federal-judiciary-883">dominated</a> by former Circuit Court of Appeals judges with Ivy League law degrees. Conservatives championed these criteria during the Bush Administration, in dispatching nominee <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100300305.html">Harriet Miers</a> and confirming John Roberts and Samuel Alito.</p><p>"The great irony here is they set up these de facto credentials for being a Supreme Court justice that don't exist in the Constitution," said University of Maryland law professor <a target="_blank" href="http://www.law.umaryland.edu/faculty/profiles/faculty.html?facultynum=083">Paula Monopoli</a>. "(Sotomayor) meets now all of the criteria they set up, and they're not talking about it."</p><p>Page's research suggests that as Americans may celebrate later this year the first Hispanic seated on the high court, they should remember the value of all kinds of backgrounds. When Sandra Day O'Connor retired four years ago, for example, she took with her the last remaining perspective of someone who had once been an elected official, one of many lost views Belknap laments.</p><p>He blames <em>Roe v. Wade</em>, a decision that has remained so divisive for the last three decades that he says no president could effectively nominate anyone other than the safest bet who resembles everyone else already sitting on the court. Law professors and politicians — two groups widely represented in the past — today come with a trail of opinions that would likely bar them from confirmation in a climate where Sotomayor has stirred controversy on a single sentence uttered eight years ago.</p><p>In the earliest days of the republic, Monopoli recalls, the court sought geographically representative perspectives to give its opinions legitimacy throughout a diverse country.</p><p>"We still need that," she said, "we just need it in a different way now."</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:00:01 -0700Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com656108 at http://www.alternet.orgHuman RightsNews & PoliticsHuman Rightssupreme courtsonia sotomayorsocial lifeJust What Is a Green Job Anyway?http://www.alternet.org/story/123819/just_what_is_a_green_job_anyway
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">President Obama&#039;s call for &quot;green jobs&quot; has created both general confusion and competing interpretations of the term.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p> </p><p><span><p>Barack Obama has been busy talking about one of his primary pre-election goals, energy independence, in mid-recession terms, with the creation of millions of proposed "green jobs." The phrase suggests two elements long considered at odds with each other -- the economy and the environment -- may in fact have a common and even co-dependent set of solutions.</p><p>Exactly what a "green job" is, though, most people aren't quite sure yet. Does it refer to Ph.D.s in white lab coats or blue-collar workers gone green? If the windmill engineer has a green job, what about the janitor who also works in his plant? A trucker hauling soda cans clearly isn't green, but what if he trades his cargo for solar panels?</p><p>"Green job" -- like "e-commerce" and "social networking" before it -- is so new a term that it is open to both general confusion and competing interpretation.</p><p>"There's no such thing; that's my definition," said Robert Pollin, co-director of the <a linkindex="32" href="http://www.peri.umass.edu/">Political Economy Research Institute</a> at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "I'm greatly in favor of investing in things that will promote a clean environment, fight global warming, and those investments will all create jobs, and I don't really care what color they are."</p><p>He recalls a <a linkindex="33" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/washington/27poll.html" target="_blank"><em>New York Times</em> poll</a> from April 2007 that found 52 percent of respondents would support protecting the environment over stimulating the economy. The premise of the question, which even Al Gore adopted in urging us to make the right choice in <em>An Inconvenient Truth</em>, was that the two are mutually exclusive.</p><p>"That showed the nature of mainstream thinking at that moment in history, less than two years ago," Pollin said.</p><p>Today, he traces the evolving notion that saving the environment will require not just cutting carbon emissions but employing everyone from climatologists to caulking-gun operators. Pollin helped author a report, in conjunction with the left-leaning <a set="yes" linkindex="34" href="http://www.americanprogress.org/" target="_blank">Center for American Progress</a>, that calculated the U.S. could generate <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/09/pdf/green_recovery.pdf" target="_blank">2 million such new jobs</a> over the next two years with a $100 billion investment in a "green recovery."</p><p>But even he is wary of the term "green jobs" for its limiting connotation with elite researchers <a linkindex="35" href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/from-petri-dish-to-gas-pump" target="_blank">extracting biofuels from algae</a>.</p><p>Most of the jobs he's talking about are ones that commonly exist and that people have already been doing, if not to environmentally friendly ends, like roofers and construction workers -- and that janitor who sweeps the floor of the windmill factory. Pollin uses the most expansive view possible of job creation tied to the environment (the 2 million figure in the "Green Recovery" report <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.miller-mccune.com/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js"></script> consists of 935,200 direct jobs, 586,000 indirect jobs and 496,000 induced jobs, all of which someone more cozy with the "green job" term might label as such).</p><p>Obama's campaign pledge called for creating 5 million "green jobs" over the next 10 years with a $150 billion investment, figures Pollin says the Obama camp got from the Clinton camp, which in turn got its numbers from advocacy groups, which were not using much actual research. Those groups were offering "aspirational" figures, a fine exercise for advocacy groups, according to Pollin, but not for economists and politicians.</p><p>An economist can calculate how many jobs will be created by a million-dollar building retrofit program -- a calculation Pollin says he's been inundated with requests to make these days. "How many 'green jobs' you get," Pollin said, "is a distraction to me."</p><p>David Kreutzer, a senior policy analyst at the conservative <a set="yes" linkindex="36" href="http://www.heritage.org/" target="_blank">Heritage Foundation</a> -- who, Pollin jokes, has made a "green job" for himself out of <a linkindex="37" href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/wm2122.cfm" target="_blank">criticizing</a> Pollin's "Green Recovery" report -- is suspicious of the fundamental argument that saving the environment will also now save the economy (he's also suspicious of where all this money will come from).</p><p>"We've always wanted this," Kreutzer said of the strategy, "and now we're trying to sell it as the solution to what you're most worried about today."</p><p><strong>Jobs Both Green and Good</strong></p><p> </p><p>Raquel Pinderhughes, a professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University, defines "green jobs" as the catch-all term for people doing any kind of work, whether mental or manual, that in some way relates to improvements in environmental quality.</p><p>She has coined a subset of the group -- "green-collar jobs" (not to be confused with "green jobs" in general, although <a linkindex="38" href="http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy">Obama's campaign has done that</a>, using the two terms interchangeably). Green-collar jobs, Pinderhughes says, refer to the specific manual labor opportunities in a green economy that would be open to low-skilled workers in industries like bicycle repair, recycling collection and waste composting.</p><p>"The idea that there are certain entry-level positions people can be trained up for relatively quickly is a very important idea," she said. "As the (green) economy deepens and gets stronger and more vibrant, there will be room in it not only for people who are already successful in the labor market but also for people the pollution-based economy has rejected."</p><p><span><p>She defines the pollution-based economy as essentially the entire economy as it has existed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. A green economy, she says, could specifically provide a <a href="http://bss.sfsu.edu/raquelrp/documents/v13FullReport.pdf" target="_blank">pathway out of poverty</a> for the people who have been considered chronically unemployable.</p><p>Existing green-collar jobs in the Bay Area, Pinderhughes' <a linkindex="32" href="http://www.redf.org/learn-from-redf/publications/125" target="_blank">research has found</a>, offer living wages, good working conditions and occupational mobility, which typically don't exist with traditional blue-collar work. While the average food-preparation and serving job in San Francisco pays about $21,000 a year, she says green-collar jobs in the city -- requiring, before basic training, the same level of skills -- average more than $34,600 with benefits.</p><p>These jobs, like retrofitting homes, have the key benefit of being unexportable, a frequent claim made of all green jobs (Obama's plan says all 5 million of his proposed jobs are "<a href="http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/factsheet_energy_speech_080308.pdf" target="_blank">good jobs that cannot be outsourced</a>").</p><p>Kreutzer counters that there is no reason windmills can't be made overseas. If they're made in ready-to-install formats, the U.S. is also essentially outsourcing assembly. What's left are the caulking jobs, the green-collar installation that by definition must be done where the buildings to be retrofit exist.</p><p>"If we focused on creating jobs that 'can't be exported,' that means we're focusing on creating jobs that do things, the product of which can't be exported," Kreutzer said. "We're going to focus our economy, our labor and our training and investment on making things that we cannot sell to the rest of the world."</p><p>A <a href="http://www.unep.org/PDF/UNEPGreenJobs_report08.pdf" target="_blank">United Nations Environment Programme report</a> on green jobs went a step further than Pinderhughes (in a direction she applauds) by defining green jobs as also "decent jobs," with good working conditions that include the right to organize.</p><p>The report identifies complexity not only in "shades of green" but also in the intersection of environmentally friendly work with worker-friendly conditions. The recycling industry in China, for example, has particularly poor and dangerous working conditions.</p><p>As the report concludes (and this is a warning author Michael Renner says applies to America just as it does China): "A job that is exploitative, harmful, or fails to pay a living wage (or worse, condemns workers to a life of poverty) can hardly be called green."</p><p>Renner, a senior researcher at the <a linkindex="33" href="http://www.worldwatch.org/" target="_blank">Worldwatch Institute</a>, concedes that talk of labor unions in conjunction with green jobs may further turn off those already skeptical of the idea. If anything, the recent push to make the American auto industry more efficient and green has been oddly intertwined with labor concessions.</p><p>"Unfortunately that is of course a concern," Renner said. "We've seen quite a strong anti-union sentiment in parts of this country, but ultimately the question I would have is, What is the economy really for if it's not to provide for the well-being of people?"</p><p>Renner salutes Obama's appointment of Congresswoman <a linkindex="34" href="http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5974" target="_blank">Hilda Solis</a> to head the Department of Labor for her apparent agreement on that question. She has been an advocate of both unions and green jobs, and she authored the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which called for an investment of $125 million in job-training programs.</p><p>But Renner also calls dismaying a trend in the opposite direction: European leaders, long far in front of their American counterparts in addressing climate change, began to backpedal at U.N. talks in Poznan, Poland, in December. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's explanation? She didn't want to endanger German jobs in an a <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.miller-mccune.com/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js"></script> lready shaky economy.</p><p>That old either/or model, Renner knows, is dying slowly.</p><p><strong>Greenest Story Gets the Greenbacks</strong></p><p> </p><p>Ultimately, a common definition for jobs in an environmentally conscious economy matters (whether we label them "green" or not) for two reasons.</p><p>As economists like Pollin prepare policy proposals and statistics for both the new administration and public consideration, we cannot measure potential job creation tied to the environment -- and stemming from significant government investment in a cleaner environment -- if people can't agree on what these jobs are.</p><p>The U.N. report counted 2.3 million jobs worldwide that currently exist in the renewable energy sector, but it called the estimate "conservative" in part because of the sketchy statistics available. That figure also counts only some of the most obviously "green" jobs and not the others that may radiate out in areas like retrofitting, construction and transportation (gray-area green jobs?). In measuring future potential growth, the most expansive definition will invariably lead to a picture of more expansive job creation.</p><p>Government, however, will likely need to rein in the definition when it comes time to dole out loan guarantees, contracts or tax credits to the creators of "green jobs" in any stimulus plan.</p><p>Kreutzer cynically suggests Obama will have plenty of help in defining the term from lobbyists. The time-management consultant who shows workers how to do in 45 hours what they used to do in 40 -- allowing them to turn off their computers an extra five hours a week -- suddenly has a "green job."</p><p>"Virtually every new thing is more energy efficient than the older model it replaces," Kreutzer said. "So, the same thing is now 'green' and deserves special subsidies. And on and on.</p><p>"Here's the net effect: The lobbyist who is best able so spin the 'green' story will get the most greenbacks."</p><p>The government could certainly curb carbon emissions -- by imposing caps on industry, for example -- in a way that wouldn't directly create jobs, just as it could stimulate the economy with no regard for the environment. Pollin, though, argues that we all get the best recovery for our money if billions of dollars -- and it appears beyond debate that Obama plans to spend billions of dollars on <em>something</em> -- are spent retrofitting public buildings rather than printing more stimulus checks people will stash in their mattresses (or even if that same amount is spent on jobs in the oil industry).</p><p>"It's really not the green part that creates jobs," Pollin said. "It's the fact that you're spending on things that are labor-intensive and have a high domestic content."</p><p>Renner's hopeful vision is that we should be aiming for an economy in which every job is green, or at least as green as it can be in terms of consciously minimizing its impact on the environment.</p><p>The alternative consequence: To continue to ignore the environment could actually lead to job loss, Renner says, as climate change disrupts agriculture and tourism or halts oil production and distribution in the wake of more hurricanes. And it will be much harder to come up with a term for that phenomenon.</p></span></p></span></p><p> </p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:00:01 -0800Emily Badger, Miller-McCune.com653253 at http://www.alternet.orgEnvironmentEnvironmentobamagreen economygreen jobs